Poppe is a brave hunter, but he’s only about an inch tall!  Help him travel through a giant sized world fighting bugs and leaping over chasms in this 2-D platformer adventure.  The ‘small character in a giant world’ theme makes me think of other games like Blue’s Journey or Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers.  It’s available on Switch and PC, but reviewed on Switch here.

Poppe can run and jump, and use a knife to attack giant bugs.  You’ll have to explore backyards full of tall grass as well as a giant house, jumping over obstacles and fighting giant bugs.  You’ll have to backtrack and go though maze like areas to find items to help you progress.  For instance, to cross a large chasm, you’ll need to find a wooden plank so you can make your way across.  Other pickups include health potions and extra lives, as well as items to increase your attack.

I really like how this looks like an 8-bit NES game I would’ve rented as a kid.  But the rest of the game is littered with problems.  The animations are fluid, but the downside is that you have to wait for Poppe to finish his animation to do things like duck and attack, so it’s easy to get the timing off and get hit when you wanted to attack.  It doesn’t help that your knife has such a short range.  There are plenty of cheap hits and you can take fall damage.  The game automatically saves when you reach a new area, but if you have already lost all your lives but one, you’ll have a hard time of things if that’s the last time it saved your game.  Boss attacks are also nigh impossible to predict and a map would’ve been super helpful.  Because of all those quibbles, I lost interest in the game pretty quickly.

Kid Factor:

The Adventures of Poppe is rated E for Everyone with an ESRB descriptor of Mild Fantasy Violence. If you get hit by a cartoony bug, you just stagger back a bit and when you lose all your hearts, you just fall over with stars above your head.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, and younger gamers may find it too difficult.

Tags: Game Reviews