Hopscotch: Are You Ready for Hardcore? (iOS)

How I found Hopscotch: Are You Ready for Hardcore?, also known simply as Hopscotch, is a very simple tale. As a joke, I tried to think up a real world activity that would transition poorly into a video game, and the example I came up with was hopscotch. However, a second after thinking I had found the answer, I realized that it would be very easy for someone to develop a passable hopscotch game for mobile phones, and sure enough, I found a few on the app store.  Hopscotch: Are You Ready for Hardcore? looked like the game closest to what I immediately imagined, so it was picked as the proving grounds for the odd idea of a hopscotch video game.

People familiar with iPhone and iPad trends won’t find Hopscotch to be anything unexpected. When you start a round of hopscotch, the familiar numbered squares from the blacktops and cement playgrounds of our youth will start drifting in from the top of the screen. If a box is on its lonesome, you only need to tap it with one finger, but if it is lined up in the same row as another, you will need to tap all the boxes in that row at the same time using more fingers. Boxes will continue to scroll in from the top of the screen, things gradually getting faster and hitting a real fever pitch once you get above 100, but things can slow down to introduce new square arrangements in the higher numbers. The new arrangements aren’t too adventurous, but they do require the slightest shift in how you play. Play will end the moment that a box manages to disappear off the bottom of the screen or your finger taps outside of the numbered squares. Oddly, since you are not actually hopping between boxes like in real life, you can click the squares on screen in any order regardless of their numbers, but there’s not much benefit to skipping around as the game speed will hit the point where you will need to keep your focus on the lowest square to avoid losing. After you end a round, you are shown your high score, and the only goal or reason to keep playing is to keep trying to beat your best score.

The presentation is certainly minimalist. The squares are simple, the music a soft but swelling tune that has the sound of piano keys match every tap you make on screen. It’s relaxing and let’s you keep your focus but still feel progress by way of the music growing and the notes moving along a scale, but Hopscotch has a very subtle obstacle by way of it’s shifting background. Using floating specks of light to give you the impression of forward movement, you gradually work your way up through slowly shifting background colors, some of them not entirely conducive to seeing the upcoming squares. The hopscotch layout remains on the same track and never does anything besides move forward, but your focus is slightly tested when the background has a vibrant or distracting color. It’s a small complication at best and one that likely won’t impact many players, but it does make the visuals more interesting as they aren’t totally background fluff.

One area where the presentation fails is the poor translation. It appears Hopscotch was made by a Russian developer, and during its translation to English, the translator found an odd fixation in the form of the word “class”. After your run ends, you get little messages that tell you what went wrong, but the translation makes them difficult to decipher. “Don’t tap past by classes” is one that makes no sense in the context of hopscotch or this video game version, and the similar “Class missed” message is equally as perplexing. You only get to see the rules the first time you turn on the game, but it appears that the developer uses the word “class” to mean the squares you are meant to be tapping. Still, “Don’t tap past by classes” doesn’t make too much sense even with that knowledge, but what I wager it means based on the actions that trigger it is that you should not tap in the space outside of the boxes. “Class missed” is much simpler, just a way of saying that a square scrolled off the bottom of the screen.

Despite the obvious translation issues, Hopscotch: Are You Ready for Hardcore? could have had incomprehensible gibberish and still come out relatively unscathed. The way you play is self-explanatory and the menus use symbols rather than words, so when it comes down to it, Hopscotch is appropriately all about the hopscotch. I can’t say I understand why it bills itself as hardcore when it has such a mellow presentation and no extreme deviations from the hopscotch formula, but it does seem like the exact kind of mobile game that could catch on for a hot minute a la Flappy Bird’s brief boom. Trying to do better and better each time in short bursts with some fairly rapid escalation of difficulty makes for an easy phone game to get sucked into for a bit. That compulsion to just do a little better next time, the urge to try new tactics to get high scores such as seeing if fingers on the same hand works better than splitting them across both hands, it compels you to keep playing it for a bit and is the kind of low commitment time-waster that people love to have while waiting around. It’s incredibly accessible, easy to get lost in, but easy to put down, and for a hopscotch game on your iPhone or iPad, you get just about all the investment you’d care to give to such a basic concept.

Even the monetization means are hardly intrusive on the core experience of tapping squares. During play, a small banner ad will appear on the bottom of the screen, and while that can make it difficult to catch the boxes as they start getting closer to leaving the screen, the boxes get larger the farther down on the screen they are and there’s no penalty for playing in airplane mode so you can easily be rid of the advertisements entirely. There’s nothing to buy and no ads between sessions, the game keeping its focus on the simple, honest hopscotch gameplay.

THE VERDICT: Hopscotch: Are You Ready for Hardcore?, despite promising seemingly more with its odd full title, is really just exactly what you’d expect of a hopscotch mobile game, and that’s not a bad thing. Hopscotch meets all the expectations it should and doesn’t ask an unusual level of involvement from the player. It’s a very simple reflex game about tapping the right parts of the screen, and the simple design makes it easy to play a few times to try and better your score. It doesn’t need to get its hooks in you and it would likely diminish its simple enjoyment by complicating things, and while it may be possible to make a complex, in-depth hopscotch game packed to the gills with features, it’s still nice to have an accessible minimalist adaptation such as this one.

And so, I give Hopscotch: Are You Ready for Hardcore? on iOS…

An OKAY rating. Hopscotch: Are You Ready for Hardcore? goes for one thing and does that one thing. It’s got a few knocks against it like the poor English and a few nice touches like the mellow music that swells as your score increases, but it captured the one thing it needed to get right to fill the niche it was aiming for. It’s virtual hopscotch, but with your fingers instead of your feet. It’s even more enjoyable than regular hopscotch because your reflexes are being tested rather than the very simple skill of jumping between squares. There could be a more faithful adaptation of real life hopscotch with something akin to the Wii Balance Board, but as a mobile phone game, this is the simplest and most clean cut version you could ask for. Your time with it will likely be sparse and in short bursts, but it’s designed for that approach, and it’s got enough to it that earning more points and getting further along the hopscotch path is enjoyable, if a bit basic.

I cannot say I am surprised by how Hopscotch: Are You Ready for Hardcore? chose to adapt its namesake. My idea of a hopscotch game was proposed in jest, but immediately it became apparent that this would be the safest and most accessible way to design one. With very little flair or faults to change that fact, it is incredibly straightforward but is able to justify its existence by doing precisely what it needed to: be a hopscotch game.