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Papo & Yo (PS3) Status: Finished playing I started playing this game on Sunday 12 July, 2015 // I stopped playing this game on: Wednesday 15 July, 2015
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
July 15, 2015 05:21:40 PM
I guess this game grew on me more than I expected. A lot more, I quite enjoyed the ending - sad yet hopeful as it is. In the beginning I felt like I was playing a puzzle game set in a Brazilian favela. I wasn't very impressed because I've played other games that had moments set in a Brazilian favela that were much...prettier? (one of the CoDMW games and Max Payne 3). Granted these were completely different games, but I was feeling a bit let down...the Papo & Yo favela felt a bit drab in comparison. The music was nice and playful...but I don't know - wasn't impressed. And then I started solving some of those puzzles and the world is not quite what you're expecting. It's magical, sort of. Sometimes little building parts will "come alive" and float somewhere else, or walls might bend over as if they were made of cardboard, or you might pull out a section of a wall to use as stairs to get to an area you can't reach. The "inside" of all the buildings, etc. is a white sparkly substance (sort of like white concrete that glows a bit?). Anyways, it gives the game a surreal feeling that, I think, resonates with the fact that the games' creative director is Colombian. More specifically, I kept on thinking of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' magical realism. One of the reasons the game grew on me is that these magical elements got increasingly strange, yet interesting. In a detached way I'd say that there was lots of variety, but really its more than that. It's like the world Quico (the protagonist) is in felt more real the more magical it got. It began to have more life and personality even as it continued to be empty. It's also a game that I never felt out stayed its welcome - I was worried in the beginning that I'd always be solving puzzles and they'd be the same, but harder. And no! The game's progression was much more varied and interesting than I expected, and curiously less "game-like" in its structure and pacing. A good thing in this context. The only thing that kind of rubbed me the wrong way was the fact that the characters spoke a non-real(?) (or at least not recognizable to me) language - but you still have bubbles with the translation. I almost feel like it would have worked better had they spoken in an actual language OR gotten rid of the speech bubbles and communicated the goals some other way?

Papo & Yo (PS3)