The Adventures of Poppe

It breaks my heart to leave a negative review for a game in my favorite niche genre, but AoP is plagued with fundamental issues. Let's get the good out of the way - the game is an Arcade Adventure, or a Dizzy-like. You platform around, collecting inventory items, then finding places for them to be used, like bringing a wood plank to create a bridge over a chasm, or find a match to set ablaze a wad of paper blocking the way, and I just happen to absolutely adore this type of games. The puzzles here are pretty easy and most are well telegraphed. Also - it all looks good. The player and the enemies are well drawn and smoothly animated, and the world is nice and colorful... and that's where good things sadly end. Have you ever played an adventure game and thought "gosh! I just wish there was more walking between puzzle locations!". Poppe takes this to an unplayable extreme: The areas are gigantic, with screens and screens of boring platforming and "tricky" enemy placement, and almost no landmarks to distinguish one area from the next. While I love exploration in other games, here I dreaded finding a new path, as all of them were a 20-minute trek to either a dead end or a puzzle hot-s…

The art and animations are mostly pretty good. Besides that the music is kinda bad, especially if you've been listening to it for a while. The game is very easy then suddenly gets very hard when you get to the house. Some jumps seem pixel perfect and require backtracking to try again, with waiting for slow moving platforms. It's a big open exploration area and there's no map or fast travel as far as I could tell so far. Got bored with it pretty quick, then frustrated. Not a good flow. Had potential but it's just not that great.

I think this game needed either a map or an inventory that can hold infinite items. As it is now, you can't hold very many items at a time, and you have to lug them back and forth across long stretches of levels that you've already crossed a few times by now just to go back and forth with the necessary key items. I think the game concept is fun, with a big open world platformer that takes place in a giant world, and where key items you find are how you make progress, and I have fun with the first two hours, but that third hour is where things got completely overwhelming when I realized just how far I would have to backtrack, and how many times, just to bring each item where it would need to go. I didn't want to play that.

This game is 50% nostalgic NES-era platforming fun and 50% irritating backtracking designed to frustrate and irritate you. To start with the good, the graphics are very charming and I like the way the gameplay unfolds organically as you progress. The combat is as simple as it gets since all you do is swipe with a knife, but the platforming gets increasingly more complex as you collect things in your inventory like a parachute and duct tape to stick to walls. There's a decent amount of detail to the environments, like blades of grass in the foreground and specific enemy behavior patterns to memorize (You fight a bunch of bugs). As you go along you pick up items to give to specific characters as extremely rudimentary puzzle-solving, e.g. give a violin bow to a grasshopper and he will let you ride his back to the other side of the area. There are also health and attack upgrades that aren't really necessary since the game is so easy but still add a bit of depth. Now for the bad- it's a lot of backtracking and in areas that are comprised of repetitive linear platforming. There are a couple parts near the end where you need to backtrack about fifteen minutes to get certain items to get …

This is a very underrated 2D platforming action game where you have to battle your way through multiple challenges and quests in a world where you're tiny and everything else is normal sized but considered huge towards you. I really enjoyed the nostalgia this game brings and Retro style which brings back childhood memories of playing NES and Genesis games. I hope this game gets more attention. The movements were fluid and I didn't face any single bug during my playthrough, fun boss fights and nice soundtracks throughout the game. Overall Rating 10/10

[h3]Solid retro platformer[/h3] A pretty decent, though sometimes frustrating, metroidvania that would be right at home on the NES. It's around 4 hours long, but could probably be at least half that with ideal sequencing. Speedrunners, have fun! Worth its price, especially if you pick it up on a sale. That said, it comes with a caveat: the game has a bevy of minor issues and some glaringly absent quality of life aspects. [h3]Noteworthy nitpicks[/h3] * No Coyote-time * One (but only one) game crash on a respawn. No progress lost, though * Some platform inconsistency due to perspectives * Some platform inconsistency due to outlining/art style * There is a lot of backtracking, and sometimes it's [i]very[/i] tedious. Some levels feel like they were just made to take time to traverse. * One particularly easy-to-miss entry to a [i]whole section of the game[/i]. For me at least, this meant... a whole lot of pointless backtracking. * Music is quite simple and the loops are on the shorter side. It's not bad, but some tracks get a little tired when coupled with the backtracking. * More than one instance of taking damage from an enemy hurtbox [i]after[/i] it was killed. * The flies are reall…