I’d seen Wuppo on the eShop a few times and it looked like the sort of game I’d want to play – silly, nonsensical stuff. It reminded me a bit of Pikuniku, although is obviously very different, and then it was incredibly cheap so I folded and here we are.
The story is (and apologies for getting lost in advance) that you are a Wum – a sort of blob creature – who lives in a hotel called The Wumhouse. In the world are are two other sentient native species, and another who were warlike and wiped out ages ago (or were they?). And now there are some space aliens who look like lions. Because you’re very messy with ice cream, you’re kicked out of the Wumhouse and so begins an adventure where you meet characters from these species, fight them, visit an underground city, come across massive bosses like a giant eel and a huge ice cream, and discover more about what you have to do through old filmstrips you play on projectors.
And play volleyball, deliver newspapers by shooting them into peoples’ faces, visit a theme park, paint a picture, and discover a face in the sky who likes to eat mud. It’s all woven together, sort of, into something mostly coherent but utterly absurd, where you end up having to save the world.
It plays out mostly as a platformer, with your bouncy little blob able to jump, and double jump, and with the right item shoot gel in the direction of the right stick in order to kill things. Quickly, you realise that the game itself isn’t the only weird thing here, as the controls are too. For example, to get into the inventory you press a direction on the d-pad rather than press +. To jump, you’d expect a face button but as this may conflict with the right stick aiming, a shoulder button is used instead – only it’s on the left, not the right like in other games where this is an issue. Both these things felt wrong for the entire duration of the game and I never got used to them. Giving items is also needlessly fiddly, as is buying things and selecting items from the inventory.
In order to progress you’re not really given enough information as to what to do, which when coupled with being given “quests” which seem to have no use or bearing on the plot (but you don’t know this at the time), it can be tricky figuring out what to do or where to go next. Also, there’s the problem of “is that platform just out of reach and I need an item or different route, or am I just mistiming my jump, or is it even a platform at all”, which is frustrating.
So while I did love the world, and the art style, and how quirky and ridiculous it all is, too many small problems in Wuppo stop me from fully recommending it. For cheaps though? You can do a lot worse.
