Big Hops is a 3D platform game about a frog, but it’s also a 3D platform game about 3D platform games. This seems almost inevitable when it comes to this most nostalgic of video game genres. But what marks Big Hops out, I think, is the sheer enthusiasm with which it explores the genre’s past, along with the invention and imagination with which it brings a panoramically broad range of influences together.
To put it another way, here is a wonderful blend of movement abilities and creative environments, enlivened by excellent memory and taste. When it comes to the abilities, the most striking is probably your frog’s tongue, which can latch on to levers to pull them and fruit to collect them, but which can also be used to swing you between grapple points when you’re high in the sky. There’s something of Insomniac’s Spider-Man to this, but there’s even more of Tomb Raider back in the Core and early Crystal Dynamics days: you position yourself, control your momentum and direction, and then close your eyes and jump. It’s thrilling.
Tomb Raider is perhaps the most striking influence on the game’s first few hours, in fact, a part of the game that I’m currently working through. The cartoon art might suggest platformers like Mario, and there’s of course plenty of that in the DNA, but the levels are huge and filled with puzzles, traversal and traversal puzzles. Within twenty minutes of learning how to jump and latch on to things with your tongue you’ll be scaling sheer walls and activating pop-out ledges. You’ll be using a variety of different jump mechanics – a float, a roll-jump, a squeeze-down high-jump – to navigate spaces that initially seem just out of reach. It’s the kind of game where you pick a point on the horizon and work out how best to get there, and that surprised me.
Exploration of large complex spaces brings Zelda-like components to the fore, with a stamina gauge that allows you to climb in limited bursts, but the game that I was really put in mind of again and again wasn’t a Nintendo joint but something older and weirder. In fact, it was a game made by Lara Croft’s creator, Toby Gard. It sometimes feels like Galleon is almost forgotten now – it was massively hyped and massively delayed back in the day, and when it arrived as an Xbox exclusive it looked rather odd and asked a lot of its players. But it was a fantastic, genre-evolving thing, a real work of passion and thought, and it offered a wide range of movement options through large, complicated spaces. It asked a lot of its players, which is high praise, and I feel like a great deal of its spirit is here, too, in this colourful game about moving a frog through familiar platforming biomes.
Playing Big Hops if you’re of a certain age is a slightly uncanny experience, actually, because every few minutes memories of a deep cut will suddenly return with that peculiar vividness you get from involuntarily latching on to something you haven’t thought about in years. There’s a bit of Grow Home in some of the plant-based tools you can deploy around the world to grow vines and place launch pads. There’s something of Mario Galaxy in sequences where the levels float in space and the platforms start to curve or become spherical. But as soon as you’re working out where you’ve seen something before, you’re marvelling at how elegantly it’s been repurposed, reworked and deployed. Big Hops has much more than just good taste.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of looking through someone’s record collection and realising that you’re getting a sense of who they are as a person. Big Hops feels a bit like that, I reckon. You’re flipping through all these lovely reference points, and yet a distinct portrait still emerges. Big Hops is willing to use everything it’s seen in platformers of the last thirty years, then, but it emerges, somehow, as entirely its own thing. It’s pretty great, all told.
