Papo & Yo

Developer: Minority Media Inc.
Steam Release: Apr 2013
Hours Played: 4.7
Similar To: Brothers - Tale of Two Sons / Hob / Submerged
Rating: 5/5 Parsnips

GAMEPLAY

In a very colourful and surreal 3D world based on a Brazilian favela or shanty town you control a schoolboy named Quico who starts to follow a mysterious young girl across town. You'll pull levers to create stairs and move chunks of the landscape; lift blocks that move houses so you may leap on their roofs to proceed; send your portable robot Lula off to activate special switches, and throw frogs and fruit around to manipulate the movement of an enormous monster. Additionally, Lula, in backpack form, functions as a jet-pack that gives you a double-jump ability to help you over the wider gaps in the jumping puzzles. There are also cardboard boxes littered around the place that you may place on your head if you need extra hints. There is no combat but you do get to splatter frogs against walls.

 

BALANCE & PACE

Overall, with distinctive chalk marks and glistening symbols that highlight where you need to go, Papo & Yo may not be a hugely challenging puzzle-adventure but is most definitely a very clever and engaging one. With cogs that sparkle, lines that direct you to Lula's switches and even the glowing fruit on the ground having a circle of chalk around them to emphasise their existence, it really is hard to go wrong. You'll even be immediately teleported to the right place in those rare moments you fall from a great height and meet your death.  You do not have a health bar, there are no collectables to search for and checkpoints crop up at very regular intervals. 
 

PRESENTATION & DESIGN
Papo & Yo is an absolute joy to play and I was gripped and intrigued from start to finish. With a good variety of puzzles, there is a great sense of movement with the camera following the action superbly. There is also a fine sense of verticality where stacking huge objects, running up and down stairs and ladders, and intricate jumping puzzles are the order of the day. The exquisite use of light and shadows also helps to give the environments that charm and the choice of music always fits the mood of the game precisely whether it be being chased by the monster or when there is a significant shift in the action. Overall, the soundtrack is excellent. It has an extremely boring menu screen but you can liven this up by having frogs jump into it with each movement of the mouse or controller. 

PROGRESS SYSTEM
Like all Shakespeare plays, Papo & Yo is divided into five acts that, for the average gamer, will take around four or five hours to complete. Personally, I completed the game in just over four and a half hours with one walkthrough peak where I missed a less obvious visual clue. Each act is generally divided up into three or four large areas that culminate in the player exiting the location with a checkpoint kicking in so you don't have to repeat content again when starting the next session. The main page, one of the most dull they could have devised, allows you to jump in where you left off or lets you start from a checkpoint which is actually an act-select screen rather than a checkpoint-select screen. There is no health to keep track of, no upgrade system, no speedrun or time-attack option here; it's all about the puzzles.

CONCLUSION

As mentioned, Papo & Yo is more charming, forgiving and clever rather than difficult and challenging. Even the monster - although he can annoyingly throw you around - cannot actually kill you. Yet I still found the pace to be just right for me. The environments, especially when things get a little Escher-esque towards the end, really are easy on the eye and just running around the areas is a fluid and pleasant experience. Only the act of picking up a frog and aiming it at the wall got frustrating because I had to do this very quickly at one point and couldn't trigger the pick-up animation in time or aim it correctly. But that's really only the one minor complaint in a game that gets so much right.