What it is. A downward or lateral hit that rebounds you off the thing you struck — a spring, a spike, an enemy’s head. Land on it, launch off it, never touch ground.

Player fantasy / why it’s fun. You’re airborne and you stay airborne. Every threat below becomes a stepping stone; the floor is failure. The chain is the fantasy — one clean pogo is fine, twelve in a row is virtuosity.

The verb

You strike-and-launch: a jump-timed or attack-timed input that, on contact, sends you back the way you came with reset air control. The player converts a collision into a restitution vector instead of a stop.

How it feels / why it’s fun

• The moment of contact is the whole feel — a hitstop pinch, a chunky sound, a launch that reads as earned. See pattern-juice-choreography for the choreography of that pinch.
• Chaining is a self-set difficulty knob. The floor punishes greed; the greedy player learns the rhythm anyway. This is pattern-mastery-and-flow made physical.
• Reading the arc before you commit is the skill. Enemies become terrain you plan across — system-telegraphs and pattern-readability decide whether that plan is fair.
• Height escalation is the reward schedule: each successful bounce grants a taller apex, so the chain visibly climbs. Payoff you can see. See system-reward-schedules.

Tuning levers

Keep the input window generous — buffer the intent, not the frame. A dropped chain should feel like your read was wrong, never that the game ate the input (see antipattern-input-lie).

Slots into

• Genres: genre-precision-platformer, genre-puzzle-platformer, genre-metroidvania, genre-action-adventure, genre-physics-arcade.
• Anchors: anchor-celeste (springs as chained lift), anchor-cuphead (the pink-parry pogo as a rhythm layer), anchor-hades and anchor-dead-cells (downward strikes that pop enemies). anchor-spelunky treats the whip/jump-on-head as improvised terrain.

Twist seams

• Bounce but every bounce raises the floor beneath you (structure). The tiles you launch off rise into place — you’re building the level upward as you chain, so a dropped chain strands you on the platform you just made. Pairs with system-progression and mechanic-stack.
• Pogo but the ground is lava that rises (constraint). The floor is death and it’s climbing. Bouncing isn’t optional style, it’s survival tempo — miss a beat and the rising hazard catches you. See system-hazards-and-environment and pattern-pacing-and-tension.
• Bounce but each surface has a different restitution (system). Springs fling, mud absorbs, enemies pop soft — the player reads the material to plan the arc. Emergent routing from a small material vocabulary; see pattern-emergence.

How it wires to Hayao

• Bounce is a restitution collision: on contact you flip and scale the velocity component along the surface normal. Keep the impulse in the sim (part of world.hash()), not the view. Study the physics/arcade lab under sandboxes/ for how a deterministic step resolves a rebound the same way every frame — the chain must replay identically for process-core-loop to hold.
• The chain counter is pure state: a monotonic integer reset on ground-contact, incremented on bounce, drives the apex bonus. Machine-checkable, no floats in the win condition.
• Feed all launch variance through the deterministic RNG if you want jitter; never Math.random. The bounce feel (hitstop, squash) is cosmetic — mark those view nodes so they stay out of the hash.

Fails when…

• The floor isn’t a threat. With no cost to landing, chaining is decoration, not a decision. Give the ground some stakes — a reset, a hazard, a lost combo — or the mechanic is antipattern-false-depth.
• Contact is unreadable. If the player can’t tell a bounceable surface from a lethal one before committing, every death feels stolen. This is antipattern-guess-the-designer; fix with pattern-readability and system-telegraphs.
• The window is too tight. Frame-perfect pogo with no buffer reads as antipattern-input-lie and kills flow.
• Height escalation has no ceiling. Uncapped chain bonus lets one loop trivialize a level — the classic antipattern-boring-optimal. Cap the ramp or gate it on new inputs.
• Bounce is the only verb. A pure pogo game exhausts its idea fast; compose it with a second layer (attack, dash) or it’s a antipattern-content-desert.

See also

• Composes with: mechanic-ground-pound (the natural downward strike), mechanic-double-jump (recovery when the chain drops), mechanic-dash (horizontal reposition mid-arc), mechanic-wall-jump (keep the chain going off geometry).
• Contrast: mechanic-parry and mechanic-deflect — same read-and-commit timing, but the reward is a counter, not lift.
• Frame it with: pattern-risk-reward (greed vs. safety on every bounce), system-mastery-curve (how the chain teaches itself), process-the-twist (which seam above makes it yours).