The Examined Game #5

In today’s episode I speak with Chris Wade, creator of Big Hops. Big Hops immediately caught my attention as a platformer. While most modern platformers still build on the foundations laid down in the 1990s, Big Hops takes inspiration from emergent gameplay systems found in games like Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Arkane Studio's Dishonored and applies to the platformer genre.

If that sounds like an interesting proposition you're right it is. 

Chris talks about the early development of the game and his decision to move away from the traditional “make a fun toy first” style of development and instead approach Big Hops from a top-down design philosophy. His core question was simple: what would happen if a 3D platformer embraced systemic gameplay and player-driven experimentation in the same way Breath of the Wild did for Zelda? 

We discuss the challenge of making a platformer stand out in 2026, the importance of having a strong gameplay hook, and why the frog tongue mechanic became the central design pillar of the game. Big Hops contains no combat. This decision added an extra level of complexity when it came to giving players enough to do in the world to keep them interested. Chris' design philosophy is that most indie combat systems feel underwhelming compared to movement mechanics, and instead focused on traversal, experimentation and player expression. 

We talk about his team losing their publisher late into production, how they kept the game alive, and the strange experience of watching players and speedrunners completely break systems in ways the developers never expected. We also talk about Nintendo’s design philosophy, Zelda, Mario, Banjo-Kazooie, Animal Crossing, Psychonauts, Dark Souls, storytelling in platformers, voice acting, emergent gameplay and why players form emotional connections to virtual worlds in the first place. 

The Examined Game

Each week, host Steven Lake asks the creators behind some of the world’s most influential video games about the meaning of life (in video games), leading to conversations about the personal and creative impact games have had on their lives.