Hot Lava

Childhood game ‘The Floor is Lava’ is being turned into a videogame

As a child, imagination turned the familiar and mundane into something more during play. Legos let you create amazing structures and recreate your favorite heroes and cartoons. Battles worthy of their own comic splash pages took place between action figures. A playground wasn’t just baking metal slides and swings; it was a fortress or pirate ship. And the floor wasn’t tiles or wood or carpet, but lava to be avoided at all costs.

If their next game is any indication, the team over at Klei must have really loved that last one.

angry red by the lakes of lava that have replaced the floor



Hot Lava transplants the fluid first-person movement popularized by Mirror’s Edge (2008) from the rooftops to the living room, the school hallways, the gymnasium: familiar places now tinted an angry red by the lakes of lava that have replaced the floor. Touching the molten ground isn’t an option; running and leaping across desks, walls, and beds as an action figure given acrobatic life is your only means to escape.

Fluid traversal is perhaps the most crucial aspect in this subgenre, the thrill of masterful acrobatics from a more innate perspective, and Klei’s flaming gauntlets promise to be tightly-designed playgrounds to leap, wall-run, and swing through. Momentum will be an important variable to consider as massive chasms abound; special surfaces will let you gain incredible speed to leap across these huge gaps.

Hot Lava doesn’t have a release date yet, but will be starting a closed beta soon. You can sign up for the beta here, and follow the game on Steam and Klei’s site.

Hot Lava
Hot Lava