The Ground Is Lava

Dean Pelton: "Hot lava" is a sweet classic children's game in which you are not allowed to touch the floor or you're dead. [...] Abed, anything to add?
Abed: Yes. Take this seriously, stay on furniture, no books, no bags, the dead can't talk, no coming back as a lava monster.

—Community, "Geothermal Escapism"

Due to Earth's gravitational pull, touching the ground is obviously essential for travelling from one location to another... unless you're in this type of scenario. For whatever reason, a character or group of characters is/are forced to accomplish a goal or task without touching the ground. This can be done by parkouring through stepping stones, ledges, Floating Platforms, or whatever else above the ground; clinging or jumping between walls or ceilings; or just flying or levitating — though usually not that last one, as it's the cheapest.

This can happen for a variety of reasons. The ground may literally be lava, or another deadly substance like spikes, poison, acid, quicksand, or bottomless pits. This makes it well suited for Platform Games. It might also be represented through the game of "the ground/floor is lava" — and the floor might be represented as actual lava if the characters are imaginative enough.

Compare Le Parkour, Roofhopping, Hood Hopping, "Mission: Impossible" Cable Drop, and The Precarious Ledge. If taken literally, expect overlap with Convection, Schmonvection, Lava Adds Awesome, or Lethal Lava Land. Can be a Self-Imposed Challenge in some video games.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• A chapter of Yotsuba&! shows Yotsuba playfully climbing on top of her father because "the ground is alligators". As a fairly objective third-person audience, we don't get to see it.

Comedy

• Daniel Tosh joked that when he was a kid, his mother would spring the "Floor is Lava" game on him any time he tried asking for a new toy or video game:
  "Now, you may have called it something different growing up, but it always meant the same thing: You were poor."

Comic Strips

• Crabgrass:
  • In this comic, Miles and Kevin play the "floor is lava" game, having moved all the furniture around to easier navigate the lava-covered living room, something Miles' mom is evidently not happy with.
  • In this Comic, Miles starts another game, but Kevin, rather than seeking higher ground, instead puts in a Melodrama about how the lava is burning him.

Films — Animated

• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: At one point, Flint, Sam, Steve, and Brent have to cross a lake of boiling kitchen oil. They jump on French fries that are floating in the oil.
• Inside Out: In addition to playing the "floor is lava" game when Riley was a child (by using film projectors in her brain to make her see the floor as lava), at one point, Joy, Bing Bong, and Sadness have to cross literal lava to reach the Train of Thought. Luckily, they have a bunch of armchairs floating in it as stepping stones.

Films — Live-Action

• The famous cable drop occurs in Mission: Impossible, where Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) infiltrates a highly secure vault within the CIA itself at Langley to hack into their database. The vault's ground is pressure-sensitive so he must avoid touching it and avoid making anything fall on it (including sweat drops).
• In the French heist film Les Spécialistes, the ground of the targeted safe room is pressure-sensitive, so the two protagonist bank robbers must navigate in it without their feet ever touching the ground (or anything falling on it) to avoid triggering the alarm.
• The climax of Tower of Death has the hero, Bobby Lo, infiltrating the titular tower's final chamber, only accessible via a corridor whose floor is electrified. Bobby, seeing a mook fall on and getting vaporized instantly, formulates a way by tying two hooks together with rope, throwing a hook from one end to another in order to hang along the corridor's walls and climb to the other side. Halfway through the rope starts breaking, but Bobby made a jump before it snaps, as the rope's broken tip touches the floor it immediately burns up the entire rope like a lit fuse.
• Train to Busan: Less "the floor is lava" and more "the floor is crawling with zombies." While making their way through the zombie-infested train, the protagonists find their path ahead blocked. Their solution? Crawl along the train's overhead luggage racks above the zombies' heads, while remaining silent and relying on the darkness provided by tunnels (as these zombies heavily rely on sight and sound to hunt).
• The Tremors franchise centers around a species of giant, desert-dwelling snake creatures called "graboids", which kill and eat their prey by latching onto it and dragging it underground. Naturally, this trope becomes an important part of the strategy for surviving against them.
• The finale of Winner Takes All has Inspector Kwan and his reluctant partner, the Gentleman Thief Shi Ka-Lok, forming an Enemy Mine to infiltrate a yakuza vault, where they can only cross by jumping from one suspended platform to another due to the floor being high-voltage panels. But while they're partway through, they're ambushed by the Yakuza's lead assassin leading to an intense fight atop panels while trying not to fall on the ground.

Literature

• Charlie Moon And The Big Bonanza Bust Up: One game that Charlie and his friends play is called "Fire Down Below", and it involves walking along a wall without falling or stepping on the ground three times, or else you'll "burn up" and thus lose the game.
• Where The Drowned Girls Go: Discussed. One character complains that, while the other girls liked their Magical Lands, she got trapped in a storybook-logic Death World where "the floor is lava" could become literally true at any time.

Live-Action TV

• Community: In "Geothermal Escapism", Abed calls a school-wide game of "hot lava" as a going-away gift for Troy. It evolves into an all-out war, with the study group centipeding by putting chairs in front of each other, Chang leading the "Locker Boys" who spring out from lockers, and the students' only safe space being "Shirley Island", a massive clump of furniture within the cafeteria.
• In the game show Floor Is Lava, contestants compete to traverse an obstacle course in a themed location without falling into the "lava" (actually an unknown liquid substance). Locations include a bedroom, a kitchen, and a planetarium.
• Squid Game: The penultimate game sees contestants having to cross from one side the room to the other on glass platforms — half of which are tempered glass that can support their weight, while the rest are normal glass that will shatter. Pick the wrong platform, and you plummet to your death. Only the three contestants at the back of the line make it. Once time is up, the remaining platforms explode, which ends up fatally goring one of the survivors.
• In an episode of The Wild Wild West, James West has to cross a corridor the bottom of which is a pool of acidic lye.

Video Games

• AmsterDoom has the Ground is Acid in a few stages, and you can only cross using floating planks and crates.
• The Assassin's Creed franchise does this several times due to the heavy use of Le Parkour.
  • Assassin's Creed II: The mission "Follow the Money" requires that Ezio not touch the ground while tailing the senator for full synchronization.
  • Assassin's Creed III:
    • "Feathers and Trees" acts as a tutorial for the player to become accustomed to the climbing and free moving mechanics in the game. It also has a full synchronization requirement of not touching the ground or water at any point, only moving from tree to tree.
    • One of the full synch requirements during the mission "Broken Trust" is to not touch the ground while Connor tries to reach his village. While this initially seems easy, since he's on a horse, you also need to kill several people along the way without dismounting the horse.
    • One mission in the Tyranny of King Washington DLC is to save a giant bear spirit without touching the ground. You do this by utilizing the eagle spirit to fly from platform to platform.
  • Assassin's Creed: Unity: The second part of "The Escape" mission has the optional objective "Don't touch the ground" as Arno chases after Élise (who is in a hot air balloon) across Paris' rooftops.
  • Assassin's Creed Syndicate: The Charles Dickens mission "The Terror of London" has one of the twins chasing Spring-Heeled Jack across London. Once he climbs onto the rooftops, the "don't touch the ground" objective activates, and you'll have to chase him using ziplines.
• The Crown of Wu has the underground caverns whose floors are streams of acid, which you need to cross by jumping above platforms. You won't lose a life if you fall in, as the water only reaches your kneecaps, but the water can drain your health until you quickly make your way to the nearest surface.
• The Divide: Enemies Within: In the aptly-named Floating City, the ground is coated with acid up to your mech's knees. While you don't die instantly, you still sustain damage for stepping on the floor and must jump to higher platforms quickly.
• Dead Island 2: During the mission "The End of the Line" players have to navigate a flooded room where the floor is electrified, traversing it via crates and other elevated objects. While the initial crossing is relatively simple, the other end of the room is missing a circuit breaker, which may lead to players taking the risk of getting into the (also flooded) side rooms to see if the missing breaker is there. It's not. It's in a different room that also has an electrified floor.
• Enemy Front have a stage in a flooded generator room. The water is electrified, and you cross by walking and jumping on wooden crates, floor boards and other platforms that doesn't conduct electricity.
• A Hat in Time:
  • Chapter 1, Act 6, called "Heating Up Mafia Town", has nearly the entire level covered in lava from the erupting volcano, turning what was once a safe stroll on the ground in previous acts into a hazardous platforming gauntlet where only the rooftops of buildings are safe havens. This adds a whole new level of tricky navigation to Mafia Town as you try to make your way to the giant faucets controlling the eruption and turn them off.
  • There are two in-game achievements that evoke the "floor is lava" gimmick. One is the aptly-named "The Floor is Lava" and it involves scaling the Lava Cake without touching the lava. The other, named "Encore!", requires you to not fall into the audience below in "The Big Parade" which the game treats as a hazard.
• Hot Lava revolves around players needing to get to the end of levels by jumping on obstacles and swinging on ropes while avoiding the lava below. One set of DLC courses replaces the lava with hot beach sand.
• Last Train Outta' Worm Town: The Worms hunt their prey by detecting any motion across the desert sands. Therefore, Pardners can increase their chances of survival by staying off the sand as much as possible, using the various cacti, giant rocks, and houses to their advantage, along with throwing around crates, ladders, and anything else they can use as temporary platforms... or distractions.
• The final boss of Metal Slug 7/XX is fought in a huge smelting vat, while your character jumps from platform to platform. If you touch the molten metal, you burst into flames and die. It has several moves that involve taking away a few platforms, or dragging them into its milling machinery to destroy them—and you.
• In Shirone: The Dragon Girl, some rooms are flooded with poisonous slime (often paired with slime enemies), so the player has to platform above the slime to progress. The trope is downplayed a bit, since Shirone can walk in the slime for a few seconds, although at a lower speed and being unable to jump.
• Splatoon 3: Late into the Return of the Mammalians compaign, you can encounter a mission titled "The Enemy Ink Is Lava!", which requires you to navigate a course covered in enemy ink without touching it, using a limited supply of your own ink and the Curling Bomb weapon to make a path covering up the enemy ink.
• The Sponge Bob Movie Game: In the late-game level "Welcome to Planktopolis... Minions", a puzzle called Plankton's Riddle will force you into this situation if you get the wrong combination of buttons once, filling the floor with lava and leaving you with only small platforms to stand on. Further wrong attempts will amplify the issue by sinking some platforms into the lava and sending MERVs to fight, and if you fail the puzzle outright, the lava will overtake the platforms and kill you.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Mario Party: The 4-player minigame "Mushroom Mix-Up" in Mario Party and its Mario Party 2 counterpart, "Hexagon Heat", has Toad raise a colored flag telling the players to head over to the same colored platform while the others sink into the water/lava below. If any of the players touch the water/lava, they're automatically out, and the last one standing wins the minigame.
  • Super Mario Sunshine: Episode 3 of World 7 (Pianta Village) tasks Mario with navigating towards the center of the village to retrieve FLUDD and get the Shine Sprite of that level without burning himself alive in fiery paint called "The Goopy Inferno".
  • Super Mario Maker 2: One of the Clear Conditions makers can put in their levels is to beat the level without touching the ground after jumping — which includes all types of ground, even floating platforms and the like. The only way to beat the level is to rely on jumping on enemies or wall jumping.
• Thunder Hoop has an area in the first game where the ground is toxic, which kills the titular character instantly. The only way to get across is by hopping on platforms, and occasionally using flying enemies in the area as a Goomba Springboard between platforms too far to jump across.
• Webbed awards the player the aptly named "Floor is Lava" achievement for traveling 20 meters without touching solid ground (webs, twigs and vines are okay). Since the main character is a spider, this is actually a fairly long distance.
• Wild C.A.T.s (1995) has several stages in Helspont's factory where the floor consists of electrified panels, and the players can only make their way across by jumping on hovering platforms. Things are made complicated when they're attacked by alien Daemonite enemies, which are immune to the electricity and can stand on the panels while trying to push the players off.
• PAYDAY 3: In Under the Surphaze, some of the exhibition rooms will have alarm sensors installed, which will trigger the alarm if a heister touches the ground. They can be turned off by reaching and pulling a switch inside.

Web Animation

• RWBY Chibi: In one skit, Ruby tells everyone who enters her room that the floor is lava. Weiss, Blake, and Yang, under the impression that she's just playing a game, humor her by avoiding touching the floor. When Roman bursts in, he refuses to play along and jumps on the floor... then promptly melts, leaving only his hat behind.
  Ruby: I tried to warn him.
• Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: Mario and Fishy Boopkins play the actual game at the beginning of "The Floor is Lava". However, Mario finds it boring and asks Satan to make it more interesting. This ends up leading to a more literal version of the game when Satan fills the Kingdom with actual lava.

Webcomics

• In this The Non-Adventures of Wonderella strip, Hitlerella kidnaps Wonderita and was going to suspend her over an actual lava pit. But since she didn't have one, Rita decided to pretend the rug was lava instead. Both Wonderella and Hitlerella are weirded out by how seriously she takes this.
• xkcd: Parodied in "Floor", where the children apply volcano management techniques to the game. Namely, blowing up a wall to redirect the flow, using running water to lower the temperature, and calling for helicopters.

Web Videos

• Secret Life SMP: Downplayed. On Day 2, Cleo's assigned secret task is to use a pig as their main mode of transportation for half of the recording session, i.e. they can touch the ground for short periods of time if necessary. When having to explain their actions throughout the session, they use "the floor is lava" as code for the nature of their assigned task.
• Parodied in a sketch by Ukinojoe, where he attempts to beat Super Mario Bros., the "hardest game in the world", without touching the ground. Every time he does touch the ground he says it doesn't count, and eventually ends the video in tears after realizing it's impossible.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: In "Rain Day Daydream", Jake entertains himself by imagining that their house is a lava-filled Death Course. Finn brushes it off until he steps on the floor and his foot catches fire — and once unleashed, Jake can't turn off his imagination on his own.
• Bluey: In "Postman"^note or "Postman and Ground's Lava", Bluey breaks her promise of playing "ground's lava" with Bingo to play "postman" instead, so she agrees to play both at the same time—deliver Bandit's letter to Chili without touching the ground. They jump through furniture, walk on ledges and objects on the floor, make stepping stones with books when Bingo decides the stairs count as lava, and ride across the lava with a bike and a vacuum.
• Camp Lazlo: At the beginning of "Lights Out", Lazlo and his friends in Jelly Cabin are pretending that the floor is hot lava.
• Craig of the Creek: In "The Ground Is Lava", Toman calls the eponymous game out of boredom, leaving almost all of the unprepared kids to the lava. On their quest to find Jessica, the Stump Trio walks on rocks and logs and at one point use their own shoes as stepping stones, while most of the other survivors use Tony Mozafari's treehouse as a safe space—before its floor breaks from overcapacity. Jessica can walk anywhere, though, as she's not playing (until Craig indirectly forces her to play).
• Miraculous Ladybug: In "Gamer 2.0", Marinette and Cat Noir are challenged by the Gamer to play a game where they fight against him on a platform, but whoever falls off and touches the floor loses. Eventually, Marinette is forced to battle alone for the final level but is allowed to use the powers of several villains. The platform gets destroyed and she appears to fall but doesn't disappear upon touching the ground and says that the game is glitching. The Gamer then touches the ground only to immediately lose the game because Marinette actually used Vulpina's powers to create an illusion of her touching the floor.
• Molly of Denali: In "The Night Manager," the episode opens with Molly and Trini playing a game involving exploring a volcano. They have to stay off the floor, which is lava.
• Work It Out Wombats!: In "Brother Day," Zeke sees pillows laid out on the ground and wants to play The Floor is Lava, but the pillows were actually cushions for reading.
• The Simpsons: In the episode Catch 'Em if You Can after Bart and Lisa finally catch up to Marge and Homer in their hotel room, they play "The Floor is Lava", hopping along the furniture. Homer whines about how he wants to leave, but the floor is lava.

Real Life

• The Trope Namer, the "ground/floor is lava" or "hot lava" game, often counts in and of itself. Players must avoid touching the ground by standing on furniture, playground equipment, or whatever's in the area, or they're out of the game.

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