Category Archive: Video Games

Hi friends!

When Monster is sleeping, you can use his belly as a trampoline to get to unreachable locations

I know that it has been quite a while, but after a long hiatus, I hope to get back into writing, as there are some games coming out in the near future that I truly believe deserve some attention that might get thrown under the rug, or brushed away. This isn’t necessarily going to be a new feature, but I do want to adapt the way that I wrote before in lieu of a more mature, insightful look at the games that I have decided to discuss. Seeing as the main area where I play games is on Steam now, most of my selections will be from there, and because of the way that release happen, this means that some of these games may have already been out on other platforms for a while, and are re-releases just coming to steam. For this weeks installment, this is exactly the case, as the game that I want to discuss is an indie gem called Papo Y Yo, which released on PSN back in August, but recently got a steam release (it came out on the 18^th).

Now I have always been a fan of games that try to tell a story that (at least attempt) to speak on issues that are more than just surface level. In many ways, the tone of a game and the way that it carries itself can turn a game that I enjoy into a game I absolutely love, and this is what initially drew me towards Papo Y Yo. I heard about the premise of the story (a young boy who is confronted with taking care of a docile monster whose addiction to frogs turns him into a raging beast) and the ties that it had to developer Vander Caballero, and decided that I needed to try it for myself. Without going into too much detail, the ties to addiction are something that I am very familiar with, so I wanted to see if a game that focuses on this could capture the feelings that I had when I dealt with similar issues.

But when he eats a poisonous frog, his demeanor quickly changes

The answer that I found was that yes, it did, to a scary degree. While there may be a few issues with the game technically (the controls aren’t the best, and the graphics are not top notch), I could instantly look past, as the game reached me in ways that other games never have. If you look at most of the reviews, nearly all of them say that while there are issues mechanically (which is to be expected with the size of the team that they had and the type of game world they developed), these are the type of stories that need to be told, and I couldn’t agree more. To be completely honest, the first time that I saw Monster eat the frog and start chasing right towards me, I felt a really weird sense of realism that I had never really felt in a game, but the depression that I initially experienced was soon quelled because I realized that I wasn’t alone in this experience. While Vander’s experience may have differed from mine, the fact that there was even a game out there period was more than enough to really entwine me deeply within the games universe.

This type of feature is something that I will continuously try to hone, as I think that there is quite a bit of room for improvement, but if you don’t have any feedback that you want to give, or your personal experiences with the game, feel free to let me know in the comments below, or you can email me at tagros.ariablarg.tv (if you want to keep it private). Hopefully this will be the first in a long line of blogs, and I thank you very much for reading!

Developer Vander Caballero was never passive about how this game was strongly informed by his life as a child

Happy Gaming,

Tagros