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Hot Lava is a platformer take on the floor is lava, coming to Apple Arcade this year

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Hot Lava is a platformer take on the floor is lava, coming to Apple Arcade this year

There've been plenty of well known video game adaptations of board games, and some pretty infamous movie adaptions too. Here's something different for you. Hot Lava is a first-person video game adaption of The Floor is Lava - or whatever you called it when you jumped from furniture to furniture as a child.

Klei Entertainment, creators of Invisible Inc, Don't Starve and more, are one of the companies who are listed as bringing games to the recently announced Apple Arcade subscription later this year. In their case it's toasty platformer Hot Lava.

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Hot Lava is all about imagination and flawless timing. Players put themselves directly into the imagination of a young child. This young child is a massive fan of a 90s-style Saturday morning cartoon named Global Action Team (G.A.T), and they liven up their own life by imagining the heroes bounding their way around their everyday life. You take on the role of one of these heroes, racing around environments like shops, gyms and parks, all while trying to avoid the floor. 

I've played a couple of hours of Hot Lava, thanks to a PC beta earlier in the year, and I quite enjoyed the game. It's not like a traditional platformer because the path you must take isn't always obvious. It also requires you to relearn most platforming elements — your jumps and speed are relevant, requiring you to move fast and have a lot of blind confidence. You also move in the direction you look, including in mid-air, which takes some getting use to, but allows you to do cool tricks once you've figured it out.

Excitingly, Hot Lava is singleplayer, multiplayer, and playable with ghosts. For a game which keeps insisting that you get faster, the latter two are great guides and distractions.

Hot Lava doesn't currently have a release date, however Apple Arcade is rumoured to be launching in fall of this year, so we can likely expect it around then.
 

Dann Sullivan
Dann Sullivan
A job in retail resulted in a sidestep into games writing back in 2011. Since then Dann has run or operated several indie game focused websites. They're currently the Editor-in-Chief of Pocket Gamer Brands, and are determined to help the site celebrate the latest and greatest games coming to mobile.