The Adventures of Poppe (PC) review "Honey, I Shrunk Samus"

The Adventures of Poppe plays out pretty much as you would suspect. It's a 2D pathfinding platformer with a familiar control scheme and almost no plot. It pretty much begins with its protagonist greeting the player and saying, “Alright, let's get moving.” Poppe clearly has no interest in a bloated plot and would just get this party started. I admire that...

Mechanically, this is a no-frills affair. You jump, you slash foes with a teeny dagger, you explore, you come to the occasional roadblock or dead end, and you explore some more. In other words, it's an intuitive title for anyone who's played their share of “Metroidvania” fare, albeit without a map screen to pore over when you're lost. Thankfully, most of Poppe's areas prove simple, and its world isn't overwhelming. The only trouble lies in the lack of fast traveling, forcing you to manually backtrack frequently throughout your journey.

Poppe does one thing differently than most pathfinders. In many cases, your roadblocks require new skills to pass, such as double jumping or transforming into a fog or whatever. Instead, many circumstances here call for single-use event items. For instance, one segment sports a long row of spikes over which you have no hope of leaping. Next to it is a sad cricket holding a violin. Thinking back, you remember seeing a violin bow (I honestly thought it was a hacksaw) sitting on a lofty leaf. The only trouble is you couldn't make the jump over to that leaf because one of the nearby platforms was missing. The solution: enter the giant house, grab a clothespin, and attach that to the plant's stem. Voila! Makeshift platform...



Of course, you still obtain your share of new abilities, including a parachute to allow you to slowly descend and some double-sided tape for wall climbing. No, double jump isn't on the menu this time. I'll be honest: I'm kind of glad to see developers skipping that maneuver and coming up with more creative ways to advance in games like this one.

As you have probably gathered, Poppe is not your average dude. If we're talking about more recent media, he's comparable to a character from Grounded, or perhaps “The Borrowers” or “The Littles” from yesteryear. In other words, where we see a cats cuddly balls of fluff, he sees them as kaiju. Poppe's world is a random person's backyard, complete with giant spiders, inchworms the size of dobermans, and mosquitoes big enough to carry our hero away. Thankfully, someone amongst his people invented a dagger perfectly able to hack up the local wildlife, and even damage upgrades for him to locate.

All of these factors considered, there isn't much in Poppe that stands out aside from the event item system. To be sure, that kept the experience engaging, especially when you got that spark of recognition upon finding something useful and realizing it would grant you access to further real estate. However, the game's best offering lies in its level design and platform arrangement. Parts of the campaign play like beats from a standard platformer, where you negotiate tiny ledges, engage in precision jumping, and plan out how to deal with various moments on the fly. One segment, for instance, involves hopping on screws sticking out of the wall while dealing with a patrolling mosquito. These guys can be a nuisance because aggroing them causes them to chase you. If you aggro one at the wrong second, it might approach at too awkward of an angle for you to dispatch easily, leading to the creature knocking you off the edge. There are no killing pits here, but there are segments that can set you back if you miss a platform. In other words, you'd fall to a region of the map that would require you to backtrack through a few screens just to pick up where you left off.



It helps that play control remains tight throughout the experience, allowing you to land precision jumps with ease. This is one of the first times I couldn't blame the controller on my mishaps in quite some time because movement is perfectly responsive, and the setup is as second-nature as it gets.

Again, this is all to be expected. As previously mentioned, this title doesn't stand out much. Sure, it boasts some solid stage design, but it's an otherwise ordinary pathfinder with minimal plot and nothing gimmicky or new. In some ways, that's a relief because sometimes you want a game that doesn't require a hefty learning curve; something you can hop right into and start playing. Poppe ticks that box and does so without feeling completely stale. Yet, the experience comes with few surprises. This isn't to say it's completely forgettable because its world differs from so many others out there. It's not just another Symphony of the Night, Metroid, or Guacamelee! clone in regards to visual style.

You know what is unexpected, though? Walking down a pathway and having a spiky object plummet off-screen and onto your head. Or finding out that a random line a nearby wall is a actually a platform and not background. Or taking damage from a foe after you've killed it. Poppe comes with infrequent sucker punches, and they're a bit frustrating to encounter. How could I have known a nut was going to fall out of the sky when it's off-screen? How was I supposed to know a vague outline of a brick was something I could stand on when other pieces of environment around it don't allow such a luxury? The worst one involved a doorway next to an exterior window that looked like scenery. I went crazy at one point because my path went cold, and I had no way to advance the campaign. It turned out there's a black patch net to some ivy that ushers you to the other side of the house. Again, how was I supposed to know?



Look, The Adventures of Poppe is a decent game, but nothing more than that. Die-hard “Metroid-like” fans like me will consume this with a small, hearty burp and move on to the next project in short order, while others who aren't so hardcore about their adoration for the sub-genre will likely tire of it quickly. The game hits its retro vibe perfectly, but so much to the point that there are few surprises, and some of them aren't the type you want to encounter...

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (March 18, 2026) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.