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Use Left and Right or A and D to run, and Up, W or Space to jump. On a phone, hold the arrow buttons with your left thumb and press Jump with your right. Tap Jump for a short hop and hold it for a full leap; you can still steer while Pico is in the air. P pauses and R restarts the level.
Each level hides a handful of mangoes. The tag on the nest shows how many are left, and the nest opens once you have them all. Thorns and falls send Pico back to the last flag he touched, and any mangoes picked up since that flag go back to their spots. Each clear earns up to three stars: one for reaching the nest, one for a run without falls and one for beating the level's target time, shown on the result card. Stars from different runs add up.
You can still jump for a moment after running off a ledge, and a press just before landing is remembered. Use that to run right up to the edge of a long gap before jumping. For a low ceiling of thorns, a quick tap keeps Pico under the spikes.
Rafts, lifts and thorn pods follow the same path every time. Stand still for a second, watch one loop, then go. Jumping from a moving raft keeps its drift, so you can hop straight up and land back on it. On a mushroom, keep Jump held as you land to bounce much higher; on crumbling leaves, keep moving, because each leaf drops soon after you touch it and grows back a few seconds later.
Pico Jump is an original platformer for fun small games, starring Pico, the site's toucan. Its twenty levels add one idea at a time: high jumps, thorns and flags, branches you can jump through, bouncy mushrooms, crumbling leaves, rafts, lifts and rolling thorn pods, then mix them in a long climb to the summit nest.
Like many modern platformers, Pico Jump forgives the jump you meant to make. A press a moment after leaving a ledge still jumps, a press a moment before landing jumps as soon as Pico touches down, and a head bump on a corner nudges him past it. Maddy Thorson, who made Celeste, has described the same small helps, often called coyote time and jump buffering.