One of the most important aspects for a 3D platformer to nail is making sure it feels amazing. Running around, jumping, climbing, diving, all of it should be a joy. You should be able to run and jump in a mostly empty room with no textures or music and still have a good time. And Big Hops, out now on PS5, PC, and Switch, is a new 3D indie platformer that succeeds perfectly at providing a platformer that’s incredible to play while also offering up plenty of ways to experiment and explore.
In Big Hops, you play as the young, precious, and very agile Hop, a talking frog with dreams of leaving his forest to see more of the world. While out with his younger sister on a hike through the woods, which serves as the game’s short and not-annoying tutorial, Hop is summoned by a mysterious voice into a strange dimension. From there, he goes on an epic journey across three different worlds to find the pieces needed to get back home. The eight hours that followed were some of the best 3D platforming I’ve played in a long, long time.
Tongue Tied
Like most main characters from platforming games, Hop can, well…hop, roll, dive, climb, and eventually swim. But Hop has something special that Mario, Ratchet, and beloved icon Bubsy lack: A handy, dandy, and very long tongue. And it’s Hop’s tongue that elevates Big Hops from a great platformer to an all-time classic.
With his trusty tongue, Hop can grapple and swing to new locations like Spider-Man. He can also use his tongue to open chests, flip levers, collect items, and even unlock doors via one of the strangest lock-picking mini-games I’ve ever seen. The tongue in Big Hops is implemented so well that using it just became second nature to me, as natural as jumping or running in any other game.
That’s not to say the tongue in Big Hops isn’t very cool and awesome, because it is, and the developers designed a lot of clever puzzles and platforming segments that take advantage of it. But it never feels like a silly slapped-on gimmick or a worthless ability that you have to be reminded of via constant screen prompts.
And yet, as cool a feature as it is, the devs don’t rely solely on Hop’s tongue to add variety to each of the massive semi-open worlds you explore over the course of Big Hops’ runtime.
Experimenting With Freaky Fruits
As you meet the locals in these places, which include pirate otters and punk rock bats, you’ll find various fruits that have all sorts of effects. One fruit, for example, when thrown against a wall, generates a rope bridge. Another fruit sets things on fire.
My favorite special fruit is a green apple that sticks to nearly any surface and can be used to create permanent grapple points. All of these fruits offer a lot of creativity and let me pull off maneuvers that felt like cheating. Wildly, Big Hops lets you hold a few of these fruits in your expandable backpack, meaning you can take them to areas where maybe the developer didn’t plan on you having a fire fruit or trampoline fruit. It feels risky as heck to offer the player so much freedom, yet I’m not complaining.
Combined, the fruits and tongue let me pull off some wild shit in this colorful 3D platformer. I was able to skip some sections of a level here or avoid a puzzle there using a combination of Big Hops’ tongue swinging and fruit storing. And it’s this focus on rewarding and encouraging experimentation and exploration that really stood out to me. There were countless times in my journey to get Hop back home when I used my tongue and a fruit to get somewhere that I thought was out of bounds, but hiding up in a corner were a few coins or other small collectibles, a little hat tip from the makers of the game for trying something weird and pulling it off.
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Back-of-the-box quote:
“Hop does what Mario won’t: Licking everything useful he sees.”
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Developer
Luckshot Games
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Type of game:
Third-person 3D platformer
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Liked:
Wonderful visuals, awesome controls, unique tongue features, music
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Disliked:
Some performance issues, a few glitches
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Platforms:
Switch, Switch 2, PC, PS5 (Played on PS5 Pro)
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Played:
Completed the main story and some side content in about 8 hours
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Release Date
January 12, 2026
Exploring and poking around levels is a joy in Big Hops, not only because the devs clearly want you to do that, but because each area and level is gorgeous, featuring cel-shaded-like visuals and crisp colors. On PS5, the game looks stunning and runs at a mostly locked 60FPS that helps the platforming feel snappy, fast, and fluid.
The creepy, purple-tinted Void sections of the game are a standout, featuring stylish environments that twist and fold around in impossible ways. Oh, and the music is wonderful, too, evoking the same vibes as you’d expect from a classic platformer from the PS1 or N64 era.
No Fighting, Just Jumping
If you’re wondering what combat feels like or what kind of enemies Hop has to deal with, well, there’s none of that in Big Hops. Technically, there are a few bugs that will chase Hop (and many more that he can eat for a stamina boost) as well as a handful of fairly easy boss fights. But outside of that, 90 percent of Big Hops is combat-free and focused entirely on platforming, exploring, and puzzle-solving.
Don’t expect a relaxing or completely cozy adventure, though, as Big Hops has some tense and fast-paced platforming challenges, especially in the second half of the game. You just won’t have to squash 300 random enemies along the way.
Big Hops is exactly what I want out of a modern 3D platformer. It takes advantage of what modern games can do, with massive levels, detailed graphics, and lots of well-performed voice acting, while also remembering that the main reason people play these kinds of games is to have fun hopping between platforms and obstacles, to feel the satisfaction of getting better with each level and conquering new, trickier jumping challenges.
Big Hops delivers that experience and more via a visually varied journey that rewards you for poking at the edges of each level while using the game’s brilliant tongue mechanic to find different ways to succeed. Nintendo designers should play Big Hops and learn some valuable lessons from this very special game.
