A cute frog game that remixes Nintendo’s best

While playing Big Hops, a new 3D platformer starring an adorable frog, I kept feeling like I was breaking the game — and, like with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, breaking it is kind of the point.

In Big Hops, you play as a frog named Hop. Early on, Hop is taken away from his home, and he works to get back by collecting airship parts from a few different areas, each with its own cute animal characters and storylines. Because he’s a frog, the primary way you interact with things is by slinging his tongue. You can use it to grab pots to toss and break them for coins, as a grappling hook to reach new areas, and to snag foods with special powers you can find littered throughout the game’s colorful, cartoony worlds.

With the combination of the tongue, Hop’s Super Mario-like jumps, dives, and wall runs, and a Zelda-like stamina meter for climbing walls, you can easily slingshot around the world and climb dizzying heights. But those special foods are what really let you get creative. A mushroom turns into a bounce pad to help you climb higher. A thrown apple becomes a grappling point on a wall. Tossing a cactus turns it into a tightrope you can use to cross chasms. (Technically, they’re not all foods — one is an oil ball, one is a bomb rock — but you get the idea.)

Best of all, you can store multiple foods at once in Hop’s backpack. By bringing the right foods to the right problem, you can come up with your own solutions to platforming sections, even surpassing the intended solutions. With one tricky wall-running challenge, I kept falling just short of the goal. But when I accidentally landed on a wall near the end, I deployed a flying fruit that I could grapple onto so I could get to the final platform. I can’t wait to see what tricks speedrunners come up with.

In addition to the main objectives, there are also little purple dots scattered everywhere that you can pick up. (There were almost always some tucked in hidden corners or atop some perilously high cliff.) Collect enough dots, and you can earn trinkets to put on your backpack that give you special perks, like pointing out where the dots are on your compass or reducing how much stamina you use while climbing. You can also find and identify bugs, which are cute and can also help you earn even more bonuses. There are flower petals you can slurp up to help customize Hop’s outfits. A blueprint that I picked up turned into a railgun that could shoot tightropes over huge gaps. And since there are no enemies wandering around, you really get to focus on exploring and platforming — though there are a handful of boss “fights” that I didn’t find too challenging.

It all creates a virtuous cycle that encourages your own solutions to basically everything in the game and rewards you for finding them. If you’re a fan of 3D Nintendo games — which was a lot of what I played growing up — you’ll find plenty to love with Big Hops. There are dedicated platforming rooms that reminded me of the secret areas in Super Mario Sunshine, one area is filled with gravity shifts like I remember from Super Mario Galaxy, and at one point I realized an intricate sewer area wouldn’t feel out of place as a Zelda dungeon.

Big Hops’ influences are obvious, but the way that it builds on them is what makes the game special.

^{Big Hops is available now on Nintendo Switch, PS5, and PC.}