The Adventures of Poppe

Genre: Metroidvania

Players: 1

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Review:

The Adventures of Poppe is a Metroidvania released in 2022 on PC and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game has players taking the role of the titular Poppe, a shrunken adventurer exploring a tiny world for treasure. Why is he tiny? Why are there tiny treasures? Who knows. Anyway, moving on…

This game’s presentation uses 2D pixel art in a 16-bit style that works well for the game, and it’s joined by a synthesized soundtrack that is absolutely awful. Yeah, you’ll want to mute this game pretty quickly after starting.

As for the gameplay, this game’s platforming and combat are largely decent but nothing spectacular, and there’s not any major hook or mechanic here to set this game apart from the genre. It’s… fine.

Well, it’s mostly fine, because as you progress you’ll find various items that act like keys allowing you to progress, but for some absurd reason you can only hold three at any given time, forcing you to backtrack even more than you ordinarily would in a Metroidvania. And just to make things even more frustrating and inconvenient, this game has no map, and many of its areas look samey.

In the end, The Adventures of Poppe is still somewhat enjoyable, but it does nothing to really set itself apart within the genre, and has multiple issues that needlessly make this game more tedious and frustrating than it needs to be, with pointless excess backtracking and no map. Given how many great Metroidvanias there are on Nintendo Switch, there’s no good reason to play this one.

tl;dr – The Adventures of Poppe is a Metroidvania where players control the titular Poppe, a tiny adventurer searching for treasure. This game doesn’t do anything especially unique or extraordinary for the genre, and it makes multiple frustrating design choices that make this game worse and require even more backtracking. You have plenty of other better Metroidvanias to choose from on Nintendo Switch, play one of those instead.

Grade: C-

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