Ink Hop

Ink Hop is an endless vertical hopper drawn entirely in pen on cream notebook paper. Blot bounces on its own, so the only thing you control is which way it drifts: touch or drag the left and right halves of the screen, or use the arrow keys. Every line you land on is an ink stroke with a wobble that redraws itself eight times a second, so the whole page quietly boils under you while you climb. Your score is the height you reach, counted in ruled lines and written in the corner in the same handwriting as everything else.

Not every stroke will hold you. Solid lines are safe. Dashed lines snap after one bounce and flutter away. Some lines slide from side to side, some ride up and down on a paper clip, and eraser strokes are rubbed out and re-inked on a loop, so you have to land on the half that still has ink. Coiled scribble springs throw you half a page upward at once. Red stars are worth picking up, a pencil jetpack drives you straight through anything in your way for a moment and a little ink umbrella turns a fall into a drift. Miss everything and you drop off the bottom of the page; touch a floating ink blot, a paper tear or the scribble monster and the drawing ends there.

Every five hundred lines the page turns. The sheet lifts and sweeps across, and a new one is underneath: school notes give way to a recipe page with coffee rings, then squared maths paper, then a travel journal held together with torn tape. Each has its own ruling, its own stains and its own marginalia — doodles, tally marks, half-finished sums and things somebody wrote in the margin and never came back to. Get it wrong and the whole page crumples into creases, and all that is left is a torn note with your score on it and the words try again.