Wuppo

What a great game! Wuppo is a long, complex, and challenging platformer adventure. Though it's crammed with characters and lore (and many dialogs), it contains delightfully diverse gameplay throughout. Most of it is about finding or buying items and using them to solve puzzles, but there is also some good combat (many "boss" fights), platform jumping, and mundane activities such as fishing and ... waiting in line for a roller coaster.

All of this takes place in a deliberately silly and funny world that nevertheless makes sense. It's immersive enough to provide the backdrop for a coherent and engaging story, as good as you would find in game worlds that take themselves much, much more seriously. It seems that the creators worked hard to avoid any associations with our own world and its history, but if you squint just enough you'll see some subtle parody and commentary. Blink and it's gone, replaced with a pleasant and bubbly society in which life is carefree and strife is rather toothless.

I strongly recommend Wuppo, but it's still worth pointing out some faults to keep your expectations in check.

The music and sound design are consistently good. The visual style is ... consistent. It's charming, to be sure, but the choice to use a very low resolution and meager color palette are a sure sign of trying too hard to be "retro." There are less grating ways to be minimalistic. At times, this style can be frustrating, as when it's almost impossible to see where you are in a screen crowded with fast-moving low-res blobs. Could we at least have made the protagonist a unique color? I also was distracted by by the "helpful" bubble following you around to tell you how many hit points you have left. This should have pushed to a corner of the screen.

The diverse gameplay does sometimes stumble. Pacing, for example, is uneven. The game starts with a lot of action platforming, but then slows down to spaced-out puzzle solving. It almost feels like you're in a different game. These styles should have been more intertwined.

Simple activities are sometimes made hard by obfuscating them via a lack of cues on how you're supposed to use items. Oh, I'm supposed to press a button, hold it pressed, and then move? How about an in-game tutorial to explain these things? I only found out midway through the game that I can create shortcut buttons to access inventory items. This, too, should have been explained.

Finally, though Wuppo is at heart a platformer, the controls are far too loose. It's too easy to slip and slide instead of neatly landing at your intended destination after jumping. Usually it's just annoying to have to go back and jump again, but during a boss fight it could be frustrating. Luckily, there are few enough boss fights and platforming areas to make this not too big of an issue. But if the balance were any different...

All in all, Wuppo as a whole works so well that it's impossible to dwell on any of its faults. Grab your controller (or keyboard), set aside a few evenings, and let yourself be transported into its wacky world.