Bunny Space Odyssey: FlopHop

Flophop is a game that tells a very cute story, centering around a bunny named Ponchee with an autonomous spacesuit, but after playing through it to completion, there are many glaring issues that I could not help but notice many reviews seem to neglect to mention or critique. The core movement lacks any real momentum or acceleration. This is obvious within the first few minutes. Jump weight feels inconsistent, and there's a noticeable input delay on top of it. Jump height also seems gated behind how hard you press the button, to the point where max input becomes the baseline just for basic traversal, not an optional way to jump higher. This gets worse in later levels, where you have to move against flowing water that outpaces your own speed. The only way through is to spam the jump button repeatedly, since there's no other legitimate traversal option built for these sections. It plays like the level design was intended for a better movement system that was never implemented. Player sprites will sometimes freeze in wrong animation states during movement, and this isn't isolated to movement either. Later levels have a collection prompt where hitting the input is supposed to gather nearby items, but the animation frequently plays without registering everything it should, and collectible items themselves have collision that can interfere with moving platforms or stack on top of each other, occasionally slowing things down or gumming up some of the few moveable platforms paths. Was the game not tested very thoroughly once these pieces started interacting with each other? Whenever there is a meteor on screen is where the game's problems are easiest to see in one place. A majority of sections have meteors directly spawning on top of the player, and your only defense is a passive spray of homing particles. The problem is the meteors are often faster than your own defenses, requiring you to constantly be holding down the attack button to get the mandatory collectables from defeating them. You're also escorting a small plant in a glass container that can survive three hits, except it doesn't actually matter if it breaks, as you just respawn nearby and keep going with no real setback. So once you've grabbed whatever collectibles you needed from a section, there's no reason to keep defending the plant at all unless a meteor happens to be about to hit you mid jump. It's a combat system you're forced to engage with that has no actual consequence attached to it. The in game text also has frequent spacing and grammar issues. That's likely just because English isn't the developers first language, which is understandable, but it still affects how the story reads in a game that leans heavily on its narrative. At the time of writing, the game sits at a high percentage positive across a fairly small number of reviews, most of them short. Given everything above, that gap between the review consensus and what I actually ran into during a full playthrough is worth noting. I'd encourage anyone considering this game to read through the actual review text rather than just going off the aggregate score. I don’t mean to come off as the harshest critic, FlopHop has fine spritework, a decent story, and clearly some care is put into its world, but the systems underneath it don't hold up once you actually play through them. If these issues were mitigated, I would have little to criticize.

incredibly good, liked the music and the narrative

サウンドトラックが素晴らしくて、まるで宇宙に没入したかのようでした。 私は普段ウサギのファンではありませんが、このゲームのおかげで好きになってしまいました。 素敵な物語で、レベルデザインもとても気に入りましたし、ファイティングがあるステージも楽しかったです。

コントローラーより心を操作された気がする。 ゲームというより、一つの感情的な体験に近い作品です。

独創的で素晴らしいインディーゲーム！

FlopHop: the only place where a bunny can vibe to cosmic beats while questioning existence...