7.5/10
Find your way to the fly in this sokoban-like pathfinder where parity and polarity become the most important things to consider for success.

What is it:

Imagine waking up as a frog, starving. You exit your brick and mortar home and see a fly. Tongue flies out. Fly slips to the right. Tongue flies out again - flies to the left. Looks like you gotta tackle this pest if you’re gonna fill your belly. You jump at the buzzer but end up landing right behind it. Flip around and jump at it again - landing again right behind it. If only you could jump one space instead of two, but frogs were not built this way. Legs are just too strong for one space. Off in the distance you see a box. Out comes your tongue slipping right past the fly. This time it's ok because you have another plan. Your tongue smacks into the box and you begin pulling. You get the box right behind the fly and jump again. SMACK!! You hit the box face on and land right on top of the fly. Into your belly it goes and back to bed you return. Another successful day. Time to rest.

Hopping Out turns the idea of moving two spaces by default into its primary gimmick. How do you get the fly if it's situated right next to you? Using your infinitely extending tongue, you pull objects towards you to impede your two-space jumping and align your trajectory with the fly you so badly need inside your belly. What does getting flies into your belly have to do with the bigger picture? I don’t know. Apparently you want to get to the city. Why the city? Has the swamp become boring? When you land on a fly and the level ends, what happens? Do you eat them? I don’t know. The game never explains any of this. But it doesn’t matter because the puzzles are fun enough.

This is the first puzzle game where I had to really become aware of the spatial concept of parity and polarity on a grid. Its core gimmick of moving two spaces unless you bump into a wall or move something with your tongue (sometimes yourself if the wall has honey on it), turns this game into a pathfinder of sorts. You see where you are, see where the fly is and from there figure out if your two-space jumping will land you on the fly (parity) or past it (polarity). If the former, congratulations, you can complete the puzzle. If the latter, now you gotta figure out how to use your tongue and the environment to move yourself one space left/up/down/right to put your jumping in line with the fly. Spoilers - 99% of the levels are the latter.



How hard is it: ★★★☆☆.

The game started out with great promise in difficulty. There are two types of puzzles - main story puzzles and optional, more difficult bonus ones. After solving the first bonus puzzle, I was pleased by the increase in difficulty and excited to see how much this would continue in the later worlds. As I progressed, I started to forget if I was playing a regular or bonus level - meaning the difficulty of the two types started to blend together. I struggled equally on main levels as I did with bonus ones. Not a bad thing - just inconsistent. The final world is full of these optional levels and some of them were pretty difficult but I must say that there wasn’t a single level that took me longer than 10-15 minutes to solve. No levels stumped me to the point where I had to take a break and chew on what I learned. That being said, there is still one hidden level whose access is an overworld puzzle that I still don’t know how to solve. But this is a meta-type puzzle that doesn’t follow the same rules as the self-contained puzzles within each stage. I’ve never been good at these. On that note, this hidden overworld puzzle was introduced near the beginning of the game which made me excited to see how many more there would be, however, as far as I am aware, there is only one in the entire game. Near the end of the game you get some clues as to what to do, but I am still stumped.

How long is it: I have solved every puzzle except the hidden one mentioned above and have logged 22 hours of playtime. Save two times I left the game running and we are looking at around 15-20 hrs of playtime. At 8 USD, this is a good puzzle bang for your buck. There are also lots of achievements I haven’t gotten so including figuring out the overworld puzzle, there could be 5 more hrs of gameplay if I really want to 100%.

Level design: I can tell the designer has some basic understanding of good puzzle design, but like many first time games, decided to mix things up by introducing tons of different mechanics instead of exploring a couple to their maximum depths. My expectations were never deviously subverted and most puzzles remained in the moderate difficulty. But they were FUN! (I guess that's the benefit of mechanic porn) Be aware that there are a handful of puzzles that completely deviate from the game’s base mechanic - two of which require some dexterity. I enjoyed most of these puzzles as they felt like breaks from the standard fair. However, there was one puzzle where you control two characters - one is trapped in a space where if you are not constantly moving you will die and need to start the entire level over and the other is moving around getting the flies like any other level. Moving one character around to solve the puzzle with the added pressure of switching to the other character and moving around before you die was not very enjoyable to me. I was very glad when that puzzle was over. But hey, you can’t win them all.

Quality: I was very happy to see the joystick work quite well on a grid-based game. Most games can’t get the cardinal directions right with a joy-stick. You tilt up with the joystick and your character moves right, etc. This game didn’t show any problems here. Nice work. There are also all the expected features: window mode, volume sliders, undo, reset, etc. However, no undo through resets. The puzzles never proved so difficult to merit this feature though so it was ok. When you finish bonus levels you get costumes and I honestly had a blast playing around with them. My favorite was I wore a mini version of me on my head like a hat and then I became a box. It was fun to see myself riding atop a box as we hopped around pulling other boxes to solve puzzles. The mini-me would also open its mouth when I stuck my tongue out. There is also a hint feature. I never used it so I leave its mystery in your hands.

The Music: The music was very good. If I am not mistaken, the dev also made the music and has made music for other games as well. Lately I have been playing a lot of puzzle games with good rhythmic BGM which makes me freestyle sing while I play. This somehow increases my puzzle-solving mental flow and I will blow through 20 puzzles before I know it. It is going to be a little disappointing the next game I play that doesn’t have banging music.

Worth the price: Definitely. 20 hrs of playtime to complete the 99% of the puzzles with 5-ish hrs of additional content for 8 USD is more than worth it. You are also supporting a dev who respects players by including basic QOL features and has potential for some difficult puzzles in the future. Get this game please.

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I do not tend to play puzzle games very often, so I didn't know what to expect going into this. What I received was an incredibly fun and thorough game that was consistently engaging and innovative the entire way through. As it progresses, the difficulty escalates accordingly, but it never feels too overwhelming to the point where I ever felt like I *couldn't* beat a level. It's a great game to pick up, play, and take a break from as you see fit.

Surrounding the levels is an endearing little world with enough personality to give the game a unique soul, and I enjoyed interacting with every NPC as they appeared. The few cutscenes that exist were always a pleasant surprise whenever they appeared.

The game is also jam-packed with content, far more than I was expecting it to have. Every time I thought it'd run out of things to offer, it'd introduce a new mechanic, a new world, new music, and plenty of cosmetic unlocks to spice up the frog's style. Even after the game ends, it rewards you with one last bonus world with appropriately difficult levels to round out the adventure.

There's also Uncle Toad.

At the time of writing this, I have beaten every world except for the bonus one, and that's probably going to keep me occupied for a while as I chip away at it. It is... incredibly challenging. But it doesn't feel impossible! I intend to 100% this thing, and it has been very fun to collect the achievements as I've gone along. Hunting for them during the campaign was a fun way to spice up my gameplay if I wanted to detour from the normal progression.

I highly recommend playing Hopping Out. Even though puzzle games aren't my typical niche, this one is a super fun and rewarding game, and it won over my heart the moment I started this little frog's adventure to the big city. It is phenomenal!

fun