Hoppy Trails

Hoppy Trails is an endless crossing game seen from above. A jackrabbit, a wagon road with traffic on it, a river carrying logs, a level crossing with a train due, and exactly one direction that counts for anything. You hop forward until something stops you. That is the whole game, and it is enough, because every obstacle in it is a timing problem with a right answer and a very short window in which to find it.

What makes it a game rather than a queue is that waiting is not free. A few seconds in, a wall of dust starts moving up the trail behind you and it never stops. Stand on a safe strip long enough to be certain of the gap and the dust takes the decision away from you; go on the first gap you see and the gap is usually a wagon. Every run is that argument, held about two hundred times.

Where the shape comes from

The one-way crossing game is one of the oldest arcade forms there is: a hazard that moves across your path on a fixed rhythm, a safe strip between each one, and a player who can only really go forwards. Cabinets were built on it in the early 1980s and the shape has outlived every generation of hardware since, for the same reason noughts and crosses outlived the slate — it needs no story and no tutorial. You learn the rules by dying to each of them once.

What the modern versions added was endlessness. There is no level to clear and no top of the screen: the trail keeps generating ahead of you, the traffic gets denser and faster the further up it you get, and the score is simply how far you went before it caught you. It turns a puzzle with a solution into a habit with a personal best.

How to play

• Move with W A S D or the arrow keys. On a phone, tap to hop forward and swipe to go sideways or back.
• Roads and rails. A wagon or a train ends the run, whether you hopped into it or it arrived while you stood there. The crossings warn you before a train: the lamps come on, and they come on early enough to walk away from.
• Water is not ground. Land on a log or you drown, and the check happens the moment you land, however fast you are tapping. A log then carries you downstream while you stand on it, so a river is two problems — getting on, and getting off before the current runs you out of the world.
• Rocks block a square outright. They cost you nothing but the hop you wanted to make.

The hoppers

Distance pays coins, and it pays them unevenly on purpose: every row is worth something, rows past the first stretch are worth more, and rows deep into a long run are worth more again. Quitting early and starting over is always the worst way to earn, which is the point — the game would rather you got better than that you played more.

There are ten characters and every one after the first three is held by two locks at once: a price in coins, and a best single run long enough to have earned it. A full purse buys nothing on its own. The later ones want distances you will not reach by accident, and one of the ten is not for sale at any price — it is out there, and that is all this page is going to say about it.

Everything is kept on the device, in the browser: your best distance, your coins, what you have unlocked and which hopper you are wearing. No account, no sign-in, nothing sent anywhere.

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