Players are introduced to this idea in the first level, ‘The Hanger’. A collectible badge hovers over a propeller that’s mounted on the wall. If players grind along this propeller to get the collectible, the propeller spins, a door opens, and the players gain access to a narrow wind-tunnel area that contains a half-pipe and extra cash.

The next level, ‘School II’, takes some small, well-known real world skating locations and mashes them together in a fictional high-school. As players follow a predictable route through the level, they’ll likely see a thick wire running from one rooftop to the next. As they skate around the level, this wire and the rooftops that it connects remain relatively central, and it’s likely the player will realize that the wire signals that there is a route from one rooftop to the next. At a minimum, they'll understand that this wire or the rooftops probably constitute a 'gap', and they could earn extra points if they could get up there. There’s a large window overlooking these rooftops, and the player knows from the Hanger level that transparent glass may be breakable.

And so begins a process of problem-solving, with the player skating around the area, looking at this potential bundle of points hanging above them, and figuring out how to reach it. In a regular platformer, the figuring-out would be the core challenge - the actual act of jumping from one ledge to another becomes relatively trivial, especially with the power-ups the player is granted in games like Crash Bandicoot Warped.

In THPS2, however, the movement system makes the challenge far more skill-based. Players must use (in a way that’s almost exploitative) legitimate point-earning trick techniques as well as their understanding of the laws of momentum in order to be successful. To reach the grindable wire in the example above, players must build a significant amount of speed in an improvised half-pipe, use this speed in conjunction with a small ramp to wall-ride up to a ledge, break through the window, survive a long drop onto one rooftop and and then maintain their speed through the course of several rooftop jumps. A tall order!