Papo & Yo is an exorcism.
Because ghosts do exist, donât they? Not necessarily in the shock-horror or Casper-friendly forms from movies or TV shows, but in the shape of memories and aftereffects left behind by people whoâve touched you. Those ghosts pop up in your lives, sometimes when you expect them and sometimes when you donât. So, yeah, game designer Vander Caballero is haunted.
We all are, probably.
Weâre also lucky that Caballero and his Minority Media development team have performed an expunging ritual by way of an lyrically engrossing video game called Papo & Yo.
Papo & Yo is about schoolboy Quico and his relationship with a monster. For the most part, thereâs no way for them to journey separately in this game; they have to move together. If youâve read about this game before, chances are that you know that Caballero has channeled his relationship with his late alcoholic father into this game.
At first, Monsterâwhoâs sort of a pink, three-story-tall idâdoesnât seem all that bad. Thereâs a surly engagement that adds another dimension to the giant character, even though you know something fearful lurks within. He points at his mouth in a pitiful, endearing way when heâs hungry and will toss around a soccer ball with you in quieter moments. His leg even twitches in the cutest way when heâs asleep.
WHY: This beautiful, heartfelt release works as both as an engaging puzzle game and a portrait of a tortured, symbiotic relationship.
Papo & Yo
Developer: Minority Media
Platforms: PS3 (version played)
Released: August 14th
Type of game: Metaphorical pseudo-memoir puzzle platformer.
What I played: Finished the gameâs five acts in about six to eight hours.
Two Things I Loved
Clever, affecting use of magical realism makes Papo & Yo one of the best games to come out this year.
The soundtrack of acoustic Latin American music provides a perfect compliment to the lovely art direction.
Two Things I Hated
Papo & Yo can feel technically rough and youâll play through spots where more polish would have helped.
Too often, the hints felt either too obvious or frustratingly vague to be helpful. Best to avoid them altogether.
Made-to-Order Back-of-Box Quotes
âThe first time you play Papo & Yo, do it alone. The next time, play with someone you love.â -Evan Narcisse, Kotaku.com
âWhen video games become playable memoirs, people will look back at Papo & Yo as an important step in that direction.â -Evan Narcisse, Kotaku.com
But then he gets angry. Early on, you run into the neon-colored frogs that send Monster on insane rampages. Those otherwise harmless frogs clearly stand in for alcohol or other dangerous substances in Minorityâs playable fable. You can even pick them up and throw them against the wall, so that they disappear after going splat. It reminded me of hiding a liquor bottle when you live with an angry drunk. Nevertheless, that drunk is going to get their fix and when he or she does⊠Oh, the rages that follow.
My Lord. The first time I had to endure one, I felt helpless in a way Iâve rarely felt as an adult. I kept mashing the X button, hoping to conjure up a dodge move for Quico that I knew didnât exist. Or at least I could jump out of the way and not get tossed around like a helpless rag doll?
No.
I ran Quico around in a panic as Monsterânow deep red with flames licking off of his skinâstomped around the level stalking me. When he caught me, he chomps down on the boy and flings him around. The cycle repeats itself until you can get him to eat a rotten fruit that makes him double over and pass out.
Later, Monster saves your life from a deathtrap puzzle youâre not ready to solve. For that moment, youâre left unsure as to how the game wants you to feel about him. That ambiguity is a bittersweet thing. It would have been easy for Caballero and the Minority development studio to make a game that rendered his father as an unremittent asshole. Instead he went for something harder. Something harder and better.
Quicoâs journeyâguided by a mysterious, magical girlâis to extinguish the anger that burns inside of Monster. He also gets help from Lula, the toy robot that promises to protect him. You also use Lula to jump further and to trigger switches in faraway places. Sheâs more than just a tool, though. She comforts Quico, telling him that the abuse he suffers from Monster isnât his fault. Despite her attempts at soothing, something bad happens. Then I hated Monster again.
You keep hearing that Quico is cursed. Only after itâs all done can you consider what the nature of his curse is and heâand youâmight survive into a life worth living.
You donât know where youâre going most times, only that more wonder and fear await. Some chapters get bookended by haunting dream sequences where all you can do is move towards the insidious Bad Thing that lurks in the distance. Despite that, the color and inventiveness of P&Yâs wonderful art direction spurs you forward. The gameworld is a shantytown wonderland, where poor neighborhoods get transformed by magical chalk drawings into canvases where anything can happen.
Itâd be disingenuous to not mention Papo & Yoâs flaws, which are mostly technical. Collision detection is clunky and thereâs lots of clipping, with body parts and walls passing through each other. Mouths and bodies donât move when characters talk. The framerate stutters sometimes, too. None of that matters, though. Shortcomings aside, youâre still getting a gently hallucinatory, one-of-a-kind experience in this downloadable, unlike anything else in video games today.
Playing through Papo & Yo mainly consists of hunting throughout a level for the scattered gears, switches and levers that will re-orient your surroundings enough to let you move on. The puzzles range from simple to mildly tricky but for the most part youâll never be incontrovertibly stumped for too long. The right wall can hold a set of gears that makes buildings sprout or flatten. Spin a key and youâll see houses sprout legs and walk. A chalk-scrawled lever can see warps a coconut tree in and out of reality. Even when a puzzleâs wracking your brain, you canât helped but be charmed by the whimsy of the gameâs logic and aesthetics.
Youâll need to move those walking houses and other moving parts into just the right position to cross gaps or jump to higher platforms. At times, youâll find yourself floating on a glowing white cube of pure imagination with the puddles of the favelas far beneath you. Itâs in these puzzles and in their solutions that the magical realism of Papo & Yo lives.
There are a few moments where Quico has to put himself in danger to fulfill his quest to cure Monster. One puzzle had me carrying frogs dangerously close to Monster to trigger a required mechanism and I shuddered with fear that he might notice. Aside from throwing frogs against walls, the only violence in the game comes from Monsterâs abuse of Quico. Because of the why and hows of how they come about, those beatings feel more devastating than any gory first-person shooter melee kill.
Papo & Yo revolves around the idea that childrenâand adults, tooâcan craft miracles out of the mundane. Flying water tanks, enchanted coconuts and hidden teleportation doorways all provide diversions away from a terrible reality if you wish hard enough. But all that imagination only gets you so far and diversions arenât solutions unto themselves. At the end of Papo & Yo, Monster rages with no calming fruit in sight. You have to be brave in a way that a grade-school kid should never have to be. Papo & Yo is about using your imagination as a coping mechanism and coupling that with the courage to grapple with your past. You donât have to have suffered through a bad childhood to feel this gameâs impact.
Papo & Yo teems with a lyrical kind of beauty. Itâs quiet, tender and imaginative in a way that can only come from having experienced too much malevolent noise and roughness. This PS3 game joins titles like Braid, To The Moon, Where Is My Heart? and Catherine in the DNA chain of games that point the way towards another more personal evolution for the medium. But you donât have to care about any of that either. Just pick up Papo & Yo and play it, and youâll experience a deeply-felt slice of human nature.
