Take a look at the screenshot below.

Looks innocent enough, right?

The stars are on timers, so you have to collect them quickly before they disappear. This involves moving the little blue circles along their tracks and cutting the ropes attached to them. The trouble is, they’re so close to together that my great big fingers keep hitting the circles when I want to hit the ropes and vice versa. It really felt like I got lucky when I finally completed the level, which is a bit of a problem.

This isn’t an isolated level, either. Plenty of levels now require you to move things around with little time to spare, so it’s really becoming a bit of an issue.

The game’s rather more involved than it might seem to be at first.

There’s an odd-looking, frog-like little chap on each level and you need to feed him a piece of candy. The candy’s tied up, so you have to cut the ropes so it ends up in his mouth. (Also: burst bubbles, blow air, etc. as I just mentioned.) Along the way you can pick up stars and finishing the level after getting all three of them is the only real mark of success.

This early level now looks absurdly simple.

A bit like Angry Birds, then, where getting past levels is easy, but really, truly completing them takes a lot more effort. Cut the Rope, though, doesn’t really on nearly as much luck, replacing it with quick swiping (sometimes with multiple fingers at once). Your fingers and thumbs need to become a blur as you use everything in the level at precisely the right time to send the candy through the stars on its way to being eaten.

In Angry Birds you need a plan, good aim and some luck. In Cut the Rope you need a plan and then the dexterity to execute it with ruthless efficiency. (In practice it doesn’t seem that different, mind, because some of the timing is so tight that it feels exactly like luck, anyway.)

Cut the Rope is a very tiring game, then. Once a level starts there’s no time to pause. The rush you get when you get all three stars on a level, though, gives you a big enough push to make you start the next one. My sleep was delayed by about twenty minutes last night due to having to do “just one more level”.

I can’t imagine I’ll continue going for all three stars on every level before moving on. It’s already getting tricky and I’m only half-way through the second set of levels (of four). I’m pretty sure, though, that any stars I do miss I’ll return to later, assuming the necessary timing doesn’t get too ridiculous.