Tackling issues of child abuse and alcoholism, Papo & Yo was originally released as a PS3-exclusive but it’s now coming to the PC and with a great many bug fixes and control tweaks to reward our patience.
See it at work in the trailer below.
Putting you into the shoes of the young boy Quico, whose father is a violent alcoholic, you jump into the boy’s imagination where his friend and ally, a rough red-skinned beast called Monster is his only companion. However, if ever Monster eats a poisonous frog, something he’ll chase after as if it were one of the gold-spewing Treasure Goblins from Diablo 3, he falls into a thick rage where nothing, not even Quico, is safe from his claws.
While Papo & Yo was generally well reviewed at release on the PS3, there were complaints of graphical glitches, control bugs, and a lack of polish. Since then developer Minority has been hard at work fixing what it can and prepping the game for release on the PC.
Even without the themes it attempts to address, the game is an intriguing prospect, one of the conceits that drives the game’s mechanics is Quico’s dreamlike control of the Brazilian Favela in which Papo & Yo is set: he can pull at a glowing thread and draw out a staircase in the wall of a building, or, by lifting a cardboard box he finds in the street, rotate and replace whole buildings.
Papo & Yo is headed for a Steam release on 18 April.