Leap Strategy: Outclimbing the Rising Screen

Updated October 2026

Leap hands you an automatic bounce and asks only one thing: where should the next landing be? The catch is that the view does not wait for you. Once your first jump starts, the screen creeps upward on its own and keeps accelerating as your height grows, so a cautious climber is eventually overtaken. Doing well means understanding how high a bounce really goes, which platforms are worth reaching for, and how fast the screen will be moving at each stage of the run.

How the climb works

Your kangaroo starts standing on a platform and does nothing until you touch the screen; that first touch launches the first jump. From then on, every landing triggers the same bounce, with no input required. Your only control is horizontal. Put a finger anywhere on the play area and drag, and the character glides toward the finger's position, closing about a third of the remaining distance every sixtieth of a second. That is quick: a trip across the whole screen settles in roughly a quarter of a second. On a keyboard, each press of the left or right arrow shifts the target 30 pixels.

The sides of the screen wrap around. Leave the left edge and you appear on the right, so the shortest route to a platform near the opposite edge is often straight through the wall. There is no way to fall off the side; the only way to lose is to drop below the bottom of the visible area.

Height is converted to score at ten pixels per metre, and the game records the highest point you have reached, not the last platform you stood on. A tall bounce that peaks above your previous best counts even if you then fall.

Platforms and landings

Every platform is 70 pixels wide and is placed at a random horizontal position. Each one sits between 68 and 100 pixels above the previous one, an average spacing of about 84 pixels, and there is exactly one platform per step, so the course is a single zig-zag chain rather than a field of choices.

Landings only register on the way down. While rising, you pass straight through platforms from below, which means you never get stuck under one. On the way down, any overlap between your 28-pixel body and the platform counts, so you can land with the centre of the character as far as 49 pixels from the platform's centre. Aiming for the middle is still wise, because a near miss at the rim costs you the step.

One bounce launches at 694 pixels per second against gravity of 1,500, which works out to a peak about 157 pixels above the take-off platform. The game steps its physics in fixed slices of time, so the arc is the same on a slow phone as on a fast one. The next platform is always within reach, and sometimes the one after it is too.

The rising screen

As soon as you start, the view scrolls upward by itself. At the start it moves at 15 pixels per second, and it gains 0.06 pixels per second for every metre of your score, up to a ceiling of 145 pixels per second. In more familiar terms:

• At 500 m the screen climbs 45 pixels per second.
• At 1,000 m it climbs 75 pixels per second.
• At 1,500 m it climbs 105 pixels per second.
• At 2,000 m it climbs 135 pixels per second, and from about 2,170 m it stays at 145.

The camera also follows you whenever your character rises above the upper third of the view, so a fast climber stays near the top with two-thirds of the screen below as a safety margin. Losing that buffer is what ends runs: if the screen has pulled ahead and you miss a landing, there is no lower platform left to catch you.

Skipping steps is the key to speed

Because a bounce peaks about 157 pixels up and steps are 68 to 100 pixels apart, two steps together are sometimes reachable in one bounce. Whenever the sum of two gaps is less than about 150 pixels, you have a choice: land on the nearer platform or reach for the higher one.

Reaching higher is far faster. Hopping to a platform 80 pixels up takes roughly 0.8 seconds from take-off to landing, an average climb near 100 pixels per second. Landing on a platform 150 pixels up takes only about 0.56 seconds, because you meet it just past the top of the arc, so the climb rate jumps to over 260 pixels per second. Early in a run the difference hardly matters. Beyond roughly 1,400 to 1,500 m, when the screen is moving faster than a one-step-at-a-time climb, those occasional double steps are what keep you ahead.

The trade-off is risk. A platform near the top of your arc leaves no margin for error; if you misjudge it and have already moved away from the lower step, you fall straight past it. Take double steps when the upper platform is clearly within reach and the lower one is far off to the side anyway, and settle for the safe step when the screen still has room below you.

How far is possible?

We ran the game's own climbing rules in a simulation with a perfect steering bot, one that always reaches the platform it picks. Every one of its runs still ended. On a typical phone-sized play area, a bot that always chose the highest reachable platform reached a median of about 2,190 m, never more than about 2,460 m, after just under three minutes. A bot that always took the nearest platform managed about 2,010 m. On a small 320-pixel-wide phone, with less screen below the character to absorb a miss, the same bots stopped around 1,900 to 2,000 m. Those figures are a ceiling for human play, not a target for a first session, but they show that the screen speed, not boredom, is what decides a strong run.

Habits that add height

• Steer during the rise. You have almost half a second of ascent on every bounce. Choose the target and move under it while going up, so you are already in place when the fall begins.
• Use the wrap. A platform near the far edge may be only a short drag away through the opposite side.
• Keep the finger down. Lifting and replacing your finger makes the character chase the new contact point. A continuous drag gives smoother, more predictable movement.
• Stay high on the screen. The higher your character sits in the view, the more room you have to recover from a missed step.
• Watch the lower edge late in the run. When the platforms you just used start disappearing below quickly, it is time to take every safe double step.

Common mistakes

Many players treat the early stage as a warm-up and drift slowly, but a slow start does not cost much; the bigger problem is constant zig-zagging with the finger, which overshoots small platforms. Another mistake is chasing a platform that is already above your peak. If you are falling and it is still above your feet, you will not land on it, so redirect to the next one down immediately. Finally, players often forget the wrap and take the long way across the screen, arriving late at a platform that was a short hop away through the opposite edge.

Your best height is saved on your device, and the game-over card lets you send any run to the Hall of Fame.