There is a particular magic that only great movement systems can achieve. When traversal itself becomes the reward, when simply getting from one place to another feels playful rather than perfunctory, a game taps into something elemental. Big Hops, the debut 3D platformer from developer and publisher Luckshot Games, understands this truth deeply. It is a game that takes familiar inspirations—Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Prince of Persia, even Super Mario Galaxy—and blends them into a confident, joyful whole that feels less like imitation and more like conversation.
At a glance, Big Hops looks modest: a colorful platformer starring a cartoon frog with an overlarge head and bigger dreams. But spend even a few minutes with it, and it becomes clear that this is a game with unusually high aspirations. It wants to compete on the same conceptual terrain as Nintendo’s most revered adventure-platformers, not by matching their budgets, but by matching their philosophy: movement should feel good, systems should invite experimentation, and players should be trusted to make their own fun.
Against long odds, Big Hops largely succeeds. It is not flawless, and at times its reach exceeds its grasp, but its ambition, creativity, and sheer sense of delight make it the first genuinely great game of 2026.
A Frog With Big Dreams
You play as Hop, a cheerful frog living a quiet life in a small forest community. From the opening moments, Big Hops communicates its tone clearly. This is not a grim epic or a sardonic indie satire—it is earnest, warm, and quietly emotional. Hop dreams of seeing the world beyond his forest, a desire that feels childlike but deeply relatable. When his wish is unexpectedly granted through strange dimensional powers, the adventure begins not with triumph, but with disorientation.
Luckshot Games does something subtle but effective here: it frames exploration not as conquest, but as yearning. Hop doesn’t want to save the world or become a hero. He wants to see what’s out there—and, once he does, he realizes that what he truly wants is to get home.
This emotional throughline grounds the game’s otherwise whimsical fantasy. It gives context to the exploration and adds surprising weight to what could have been a purely mechanical experience.
Movement as the Main Event
From the moment you take control of Hop, Big Hops makes its priorities clear. Movement is everything.
Hop’s basic locomotion immediately evokes Super Mario Odyssey. There is a springiness to his jumps, a responsiveness to his midair control, and a sense of momentum that makes running, hopping, and sliding inherently pleasurable. Like Mario, Hop can belly slide to maintain speed, chaining jumps and slides together into fluid traversal sequences that feel improvised rather than scripted.
But Big Hops doesn’t stop there. It layers additional movement mechanics on top of this foundation, each one carefully tuned and seamlessly integrated.
Hop can wall-run along vertical surfaces, recalling the kinetic flow of Prince of Persia or Titanfall. He can climb nearly any wall, Breath of the Wild-style, governed by a stamina meter that forces moment-to-moment decisions about risk and efficiency. His long, stretchy frog tongue functions as a grappling hook, letting him swing from hooks, latch onto handles, and snatch objects from afar.
What’s remarkable is how natural all of this feels. None of these abilities feels bolted on or overwhelming. Instead, Big Hops excels at teaching through play. You quickly learn how to chain mechanics together—wall-running into a tongue swing, then belly-sliding into a jump—without the game ever stopping to instruct you explicitly.
This is where Big Hops truly shines. Traversal is not a checklist of abilities to master, but a vocabulary you slowly internalize. The joy comes from discovering how these verbs interact, and then using them creatively to solve traversal puzzles in your own way.
Twisting Gravity and The Void
Shortly into the game, Hop encounters Diss, an extradimensional imp whose sharp tongue is matched only by his evasiveness. Diss serves as both guide and manipulator, whisking Hop away to The Void—a liminal space that connects multiple worlds and bends the laws of physics in unsettling ways.
The Void introduces one of Big Hops’ more daring ideas: flexible gravity. In certain areas, gravity twists and curves, causing Hop to land upside-down or sideways as the camera reorients itself. The effect is reminiscent of Super Mario Galaxy, but used more sparingly and in service of traversal puzzles rather than spectacle.
Thanks to the movement system’s strength, these gravity shifts feel intuitive rather than disorienting. By the time they’re introduced, you trust the game—and your own abilities—enough to adapt quickly. It’s a testament to Luckshot’s design confidence that such potentially frustrating mechanics instead feel like natural extensions of play.
Worlds With Stories, Not Checklists
Hop’s journey takes him to three distinct worlds, each populated by its own communities, conflicts, and environmental identities. These are not vast open worlds in the modern sense, but dense, thoughtfully designed spaces that reward curiosity.
Each world tells a self-contained story, often centered on cultural or ideological friction. In one, a rabbit family business ignores a growing sinkhole that threatens the wider community. In another, an otter-run oil operation collapses under the weight of a bitter founder dispute. These stories are surprisingly nuanced for a game of this tone, often resolving in ways that feel honest rather than tidy.
Not every problem is fully solved. Some tensions linger. Some compromises feel imperfect. That restraint gives Big Hops a maturity that’s easy to overlook beneath its colorful exterior.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the game’s overarching narrative. Diss tasks Hop with collecting Dark Drips—mysterious globules of void energy—while another character promises to build Hop an airship if he gathers the necessary parts. The dual objectives create an interesting tension between obligation and escape, but the larger plot surrounding Diss and the Dark Drips accelerates abruptly near the end.
In its final stretch, the story becomes muddled, with motivations and consequences that are less clearly articulated than the quieter, world-specific tales. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it is a noticeable dip in narrative clarity.
Systems That Encourage Playfulness
Mechanically, Big Hops thrives on flexibility. Dark Drips function as a primary collectible, traded to Diss for trinkets that modify Hop’s abilities. These range from practical upgrades—reduced stamina costs, improved sliding friction, collectible trackers—to more radical options.
One trinket grants permanent invincibility at the cost of all other trinket slots, a bold design choice that invites experimentation rather than punishing it. Want to turn the game into a pure traversal sandbox? You can. Prefer a more constrained, traditional platforming challenge? That’s an option too.
The only real downside is usability. Swapping trinkets requires manual adjustment, and the lack of loadouts makes experimentation slightly more cumbersome than it needs to be. It’s a small but noticeable friction point in an otherwise elegant system.
Fruits, Seeds, and Emergent Solutions
If Dark Drips are the game’s currency, fruits and seeds are its soul.
Scattered throughout the world are strange plants bearing magical fruits, each with unique properties. An acorn can be planted to grow a towering vine. Other fruits create bouncing bubbles, invert gravity, explode specific surfaces, or generate floating zero-gravity zones.
Crucially, these items can be picked up and stored for later use. There are a few hard restrictions on how or where you deploy them, beyond the requirement that they be thrown against a surface. This creates a sense of emergent problem-solving that feels thrillingly close to “breaking” the game—until you realize that the developers anticipated this freedom all along.
Many traversal puzzles can be solved in multiple ways, depending on which fruits you bring with you and how creatively you use them. Big Hops rarely tells you the “correct” solution, instead inviting you to invent your own.
This philosophy mirrors Breath of the Wild more than any other inspiration, and it’s where Big Hops feels most confident and original.
When Freedom Briefly Falters
Ironically, Big Hops stumbles most when it abandons this philosophy. In the third world, an extended mine cart sequence introduces more rigid mechanics and tighter requirements. The segment feels noticeably more constrained, and the mine cart controls lack the precision and fluidity of Hop’s core movement.
There are no obvious alternative solutions here, no clever fruit combinations to bypass the sequence. You must engage with it on its terms, and while it’s not outright bad, it feels out of step with the rest of the game.
The contrast is instructive. Big Hops is at its best when it empowers player creativity and trusts its systems. When it funnels you into narrowly defined challenges, its limitations become more apparent.
A Surprisingly Polished Presentation
For a relatively small production, Big Hops boasts impressive presentation values. The character designs are expressive and memorable—Hop’s wide-eyed optimism contrasts beautifully with Diss’s wiry, angular snark. The worlds are vibrant and distinct, filled with color and visual personality.
Many characters are fully voiced, and the performances are consistently strong, adding warmth and charm to the storytelling. There are moments where the game’s budgetary constraints peek through—characters occasionally “teleport” ahead rather than walking naturally—but these moments are brief and forgivable.
The soundtrack complements the tone well, alternating between playful melodies and more reflective themes, while sound design reinforces the tactile joy of movement. Every hop, slide, and tongue-snap feels satisfying.
The Joy of Simply Playing
At its core, Big Hops is a celebration of play. It understands that the best platformers are not about perfect execution, but about expression. Hop’s movement set is not enormous, but it is exquisitely tuned, encouraging players to string actions together in ways that feel personal and improvised.
The worlds are not massive, but they are dense with possibility. The story is not epic, but it is heartfelt. Taken together, these elements create a game that feels greater than the sum of its parts.
There is something deeply refreshing about a game that trusts the player this much. Big Hops doesn’t constantly reward you with explosions or cutscenes. It rewards you by making movement itself fun—by turning the act of getting somewhere into a small joy of its own.
Final Verdict
Big Hops is not a perfect game. Its final act falters narratively, and a few overly restrictive segments undermine its otherwise stellar design philosophy. But these are small blemishes on an experience defined by confidence, creativity, and joy.
Luckshot Games has delivered a debut that punches far above its weight, crafting a 3D platformer that dares to stand alongside some of the genre’s most revered titles—and earns that comparison through thoughtful systems rather than spectacle.
In a year still in its infancy, Big Hops already feels like a standout. It is a reminder that great games don’t need to be massive, cynical, or endlessly monetized. Sometimes, all they need is a frog, a good jump, and the freedom to explore.
Big Hops is the year’s first great game—and a thrilling promise of what Luckshot Games might achieve next.