After refusing to listen to his parents, the disobedient Popotinho finds himself abandoned, with his mum and dad believing that alone time would teach our potato-shaped star a lesson. Little did they realise that Popotinho would venture into the wilderness to find them; a world filled with moving platforms, spinning saw blades, spiked floors, and somewhat weirdly, men wearing chunky TV screens on their heads – a peculiar abnormality in the enemy roster.
Sadly, Popothino’s disobedient nature extends to the game’s controls. He isn’t the easiest of characters to manoeuvre, leading to more than a few cheap deaths. Movement is slippery, the double-jump is accompanied by a distracting spinning animation, enemies can nudge our portly protag off ledges, and when defeating foes – which include birds, bees, and rampaging rocks – you’ll need to be very precise when jumping on their heads. While most enemies can be avoided, with nothing to gain for defeating them, there are a few instances where you’ll need to leap on enemies to reach higher areas. Thankfully, stages are short, and checkpoints are common. Popotinho can also bag an extra life by collecting 50 fruits, which are in abundance.

50 stages feature in total, lasting a couple of minutes each – although a handful of dull ‘filler’ stages feature periodically, one of which merely involves running to the right. Popotinho doesn’t gain any new moves throughout this 2 hour (approx.) adventure, and there’s nothing in the way of power-ups or weapons, ergo no boss battles. This wouldn’t be so bad if there was a drip-feed of new hazards to compensate, but it’s oddly lacking in that area too, not even introducing spinning saw blades of varying speeds until the final moment.
There are some challenging sections to overcome though, and this prevents Popotinho’s Adventures from feeling brainless. A couple of stages midway through, mostly involving bouncing on springs attached to moving platforms, took a while to beat. The satisfaction from overcoming said challenges was diminished somewhat by the iffy control scheme, making these sections feel harder than they should’ve been.

The presentation here is pretty basic, which is perhaps what you’d expect for something in the £5 price point. There’s a single cut-scene at the beginning and a congratulatory screen at the end – with no storytelling taking place between. Level backdrops do change often though, and the pixel art is mostly tidily drawn. I think we should just be grateful that the checkpoints are proficiently placed, helping to lessen some frustration.
Popotinho’s Adventures is a straightforward platformer with nothing new to offer, even falling short of the more experimental platformers found in the 16-bit era, which were at least more interesting on a conceptual level. In the end, the only thing that stuck out were the aforementioned enemies sporting old skool TV screens. It’s a shame Popotinho’s adventure didn’t have more nonsensical elements such as this to make it pop.
eastasiasoft’s Popotinho’s Adventures is out 22nd Jan on all formats.