Upon first glance, Big Hops looks extremely traditional. A 3D platformer about an anthropomorphic frog who needs to find his sister is an idea that could have been pitched at basically any time in the last three decades. But the more you play Luckshot Games’ execution on that idea, the clearer it becomes that the studio’s sophomore game is doing something new.
Movement First, Movement Forever
I went hands-on with Big Hops during Day of the Devs, Double Fine and iam8bit’s indie-focused preview event at GDC in San Francisco, and after an hour of play, I saw a few things in the game that excited even a seasoned platformer fan like myself.
The game’s most foundational element is its approach to movement, which brings in several mechanics you wouldn’t have seen in the early ’00s platformers, despite it often feeling like a throwback. Hop can wall run. He has a stamina wheel (or, more accurately, a stamina lily pad) that determines how far and long he can climb. His tongue is a versatile tool that has a mundane use — Hop can use it to collect food — and an exciting one — he can swing around like Indiana Jones.
Director Chris Wade tells me this freedom of movement was inspired by his work on games that were, by necessity, aiming for the exact opposite.
“At the time I started making this I was working at a VR company, and I was really frustrated that in VR games you can’t move the player at all because they’ll get motion sick,” Wade says. “I wanted to make as much the opposite thing of that as possible.”
That extends beyond Hop’s moveset — though the game is a joy to play on that important, basic level of, well, hopping. As you progress, you gain access to a selection of consumable items that can alter the landscape around you in major ways. Early on, I found a mushroom, which Hop could eat to replenish health, or throw. Wherever you throw it, it will stick, becoming a trampoline you can use to reach higher levels.
The game’s villain, Diss, is played by veteran voice actor Ben Diskin who in the past has voiced iconic characters like Eugene from Hey Arnold! and Numbuh 1 and Numbuh 2 in Codename: Kids Next Door.
If You Really Feelin’ Froggish, Leap
Later on, I started to find acorns. Like the mushrooms, these grow on trees in the environment. You can chuck one at a wall or at the ground, then watch as a stalk grows up into the air. You can then use the stalk to climb to places you couldn’t otherwise reach. When combined with the mushroom trampolines, these acorn stalks open up all sorts of cool systemic interactions that you just don’t see often in 3D platformers. There’s no one way to solve the game’s platforming puzzles.
Wade started work on the game in 2019, and Big Hops clearly emerged from a post-Breath of the Wild world.
“3D platformers are based on gimmicks and movesets, but there hasn’t been one that has emergent systems in it in the way [there were] in Breath of the Wild,” he says. “There’s all these interesting dynamics and you’re building things and I was like, this is a future for the genre that nobody’s working on right now. It has been a really long journey to make it actually realized, but we’re getting there.”
Though Big Hops looks nothing like it, Spelunky is probably the closest comparison point, and Wade gave it a shout-out during our chat.
Hop can only carry one item in his hands at a time, but toward the end of my one-hour demo, I found the backpack, which is a true gamechanger. You can stash mushrooms and acorns (and many more items I didn’t get to see) away for future use, then unleash them all to radically alter the level in ways that will be individualized to your playstyle. Crossing a gap by strategically placing mushrooms and stalks to form an organic jungle gym was a ton of fun, and had me imagining all sorts of future possibilities
As a 3D platformer fan who loves Breath of the Wild, seeing a game attempt to bring the best of both worlds together is exciting. What’s even more exciting is that Big Hops seems to be pulling it off.
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