Hop Mania

Occasionally, Google will surprise me with a new game to play. I'll be using one of their products for one thing or another, and then find a game that I wasn't expecting. Normally, my encounter rate for these games is pretty spread out, but Hop Mania ended up being the start of a relatively rapid burst of Google games that I discovered around the same time, each housed in a different product. Found within the Google Play Games app, Hop Mania is one of the "offline" games that come built-in, alongside the likes of solitaire and Snake. I don't think I even meant to play it for more than a minute or two, but the familiar gameplay coupled with the eerie atmosphere kept me around for a little longer.

Seemingly as a tribute to its inspiration, Hop Mania gives you the choice between a frog and a chicken, the mascots of Frogger and Crossy Road respectively, as your playable character. Then you get two on-screen buttons for movement, allowing you to go either forward or backward as you attempt to traverse the upcoming, treacherous environments. What follows is essentially a set of small stages, each with its own theme. You'll cross high-traffic streets and lumber-filled rivers reminiscent of the game's progenitors before entering a desert, a cemetery, an interdimensional portal, and the site of an ongoing alien invasion.

While you travel through each of those locations, your official goal is to earn the highest score that you can. However, I mostly ignored that in favor of trying to discover all of the game's secrets. While Hop Mania is a very small game, I had fun making discoveries like the Super Mario Bros. style warp zone that you can enter by going backward at the start instead of forwards. As far as I could tell, there wasn't any tangible reward for finding things like that, but I still enjoyed the sense of discovery.

As I'm not much of a high-score chaser, my time with Hop Mania was brief but still surprisingly involved for a Google game. While I would still consider it to be a bite-sized experience, much like most of its peers, Hop Mania offers just a little more to discover for the players that are willing to dig a little deeper. While it is by no means a must-play kind of title, if you're stuck in a waiting room with poor Internet, this might not be a bad option to pass a few minutes.

The game is available for Android here (as of 2/10/23): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.play.games&hl=en_US&gl=US

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