Cloud Hopper

Cloud Hopper is a free endless jumping game you play right in your browser. Pip, a round orange bird in a striped scarf, bounces on its own every time it lands on a cloud, and your only job is to steer it left and right onto the next cloud up. It is a classic vertical platform jumper in the spirit of the doodle-style jump games, set in a painted sky that changes as you climb: sunset cliffs with a low golden sun, castle spires on islands of cloud, a violet twilight with a crescent moon, and finally a starry night with ribbons of aurora. There is nothing to install and nothing to learn beyond two directions, which makes it one of the quickest of our jumping games to pick up.

Every cloud behaves differently. White clouds are solid and safe, pink clouds slide from side to side, so you meet them where they will be when you come down, and grey storm clouds hold you exactly once before they crumble. Land right on a blue spring and Pip is launched three times higher with a BOING, and grab a firework rocket to blast more than 400 metres straight up through everything in your way. The screen wraps around at the edges, so flying off the left side brings you back on the right, which is often the shortest way to the next cloud. To make the start easy, a bank of safety clouds follows you for the first 30 seconds and bounces you back up if you miss.

The higher you go, the busier the sky gets. Golden star trails hang along the best paths between clouds and pay a few points each, and grumpy storm crows fly across the gaps. Drop onto a crow from above to stomp it for a free bounce and 25 points, but fly into one from below or the side and it knocks you down, so watch where they are heading before you jump. A spring launch or a rocket ploughs straight through them.

There are two ways to play. In Endless there is no clock: you climb until you fall, and the leaderboard is simply how high you got. The sky keeps getting harder all the way up, with narrower clouds, longer gaps, more sliding clouds and more crows, so even a great run ends after a few minutes, and every new try is a chance to beat your best height. Timed is the same sky on a two-minute clock for a quick round, which makes it one of our quick games. Each mode has its own weekly and all-time leaderboards.

Your score is the height of the highest cloud you have landed on, in metres, plus 5 points for every star and 25 for every crow you stomp, so height counts for far more than anything else. Free play is unlimited, and when you want a climb to count, press Ranked attempt: your run is replayed and verified on our servers before it joins the leaderboards, which makes Cloud Hopper a natural fit for our competitive games.

The controls work the same everywhere. On a phone or tablet, hold the left half of the screen to steer left and the right half to steer right. On a computer, hold the arrow keys or A and D, or press and hold the mouse on either side of the game, and press P to pause. It is one of our easiest keyboard games, plays just as well on mobile and PC, and sits alongside our action games and the rest of our free online games with no download.