Cat Ninja Controls and Tricks: Every Move, Every Key

Cat Ninja looks like a simple platformer until the second room, when a sign says “WALL JUMP” and a shaft goes straight up. The game never has a tutorial screen; each early level paints one move on the wall and then builds a room that needs it. This guide collects all of them in one place, with what each move is actually for.

Getting started

The game opens on its credits room — the names of the programmer, the musicians and the publisher, written on the walls of a long corridor. There is no Start button. Click inside the game once so it gets the keyboard, then walk right: the last sign says “Move forward to save the world!”, and level 1 begins where the corridor ends. The top-left corner shows two counters, deaths and crystals collected. Both start at zero, and only one of them is supposed to go up quickly.

The five moves

Jump and double jump. Up jumps. Tap Up again in the air for a second jump. You get one extra jump per leap. Level 3’s sign spells it out: double tap up to double jump.

Wall jump. Jump into a wall and the cat sticks to it and slides. Press Up while sliding and it kicks off the other way. Between two walls you can climb any height by alternating. Not every wall works: level 3 also introduces sticky walls that you cannot wall jump on, and several later climbs are designed so that the obvious wall is the sticky one.

Roll. Hold Down while moving. The cat drops low and keeps its speed, which gets it through gaps one tile high. Rolling is also the safest way along a narrow ledge, because you are committed to one direction and cannot overshoot with a stray jump.

Slam. Hold Down while in the air. The cat stops drifting and drops straight down. On most floors that is just a precise landing. On glass it breaks the pane — level 4 tells you so, and level 8, the “glass ride of DEATH” (five dollars per ride, by the way), is a whole level of slamming through one sheet after another.

Jetpack. From level 10 you have a jetpack, switched on and off with Space. It is a toggle, not a hold: switch it on, steer with the arrows, and remember to switch it off before you need to drop into a gap.

The keys nobody tells you about

R resets you. A sign in level 6 says “Pressing R saves the day”, and it is not joking — some rooms let you drop into a pit you cannot climb out of, and level 18 walks you down “the much better path”, then admits it was the wrong one and suggests R. Use it the moment you realise you are trapped; the death counter does not care.

Tricks that save lives

• Let go after a wall kick. The cat keeps its momentum. If you hold towards the wall straight after kicking off, you swing back into it. Release for a moment, then steer.
• Save the double jump. Use the first jump to get off the ledge and keep the second for correcting the landing. Spending both at once leaves nothing when a gap turns out to be wider.
• Slam to stop short. A slam kills your horizontal drift, which makes it the best way to land on a one-tile platform after a long jump.
• Doubt the narrator. The same voice that says spikes are harmless later promises the right teleporter will not kill you, then adds “Should’ve trusted me”. Signs point at traps more often than at safety.
• Stop at continue points. After a death you go back to the last continue point you touched. Treat each one as a checkpoint to pause at, not a line to run past.

That is everything the game asks of you. The rest is 30 rooms of combining those moves in orders the level designer found funny. Play Cat Ninja from the start, or read the level-by-level walkthrough when a room has you stuck.