Cube Hop

You stand atop a pyramid of cubes drawn in isometric perspective. Each diagonal hop you make changes the cube you land on to the target color. Turn the entire pyramid to that color to clear the stage, while staying on the blocks, because a hop into empty space sends you tumbling.

• Every hop lands one cube diagonally; plan a route that touches all of them.
• Some stages need more than one hop per cube, or you may flip a cube back the wrong way, watch the order.
• Avoid wandering enemies and don't leap off the edge.

• Desktop: Arrow keys or WASD map to the four diagonals, Up = up-right, Left = up-left, Down = down-left, Right = down-right.
• Phone & tablet: on-screen diagonal buttons let you play entirely by touch.

• Plan a snaking path that visits each cube exactly the right number of times.
• Work toward the edges last so you always have a block to retreat onto.
• Keep an escape hop in mind whenever an enemy shares your row.

Cube Hop is a nod to Q*bert, released by Gottlieb in 1982 and designed by Warren Davis and Jeff Lee. You bounce down a pyramid of cubes, flipping the top of each to a target colour, while Coily the snake hunts you and assorted creatures ricochet past.

The controls are the joke and the difficulty at once: movement is diagonal, rotated forty-five degrees from the way the pyramid is drawn, so the direction that looks like down is not. The discs at the pyramid's edges are the only way to turn a chase around — step onto one and Coily follows you off the edge — which makes being cornered a resource rather than a mistake.

Cube Hop is an original take on the isometric cube-hopping arcade genre, free to play in your browser with no installs.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.