Sopa: Tale of the Stolen Potato (XSX) Review
Summary: A colourful kid friendly adventure with plenty of laughs and heart.
3.5
Just like nana used to make
Sopa: Tale of the Stolen Potato is a whimsical, family-friendly adventure boiling over with laughs and plenty of heart.
Our story begins with Sopa’s precocious protagonist, a young boy named Miho, tasked by his Nana with retrieving a potato from the pantry for the soup.
A simple request, until the sack of spuds at the back of the larder is pilfered by a felonious frog and Miho is literally dragged into a strange world of Latin American folklore, myth, and frogs with a penchant for fedoras.
After giving chase down the river in a hastily constructed boat made of an old washing-up tub and a broom, the game begins proper, and Miho is left to hunt for the missing maris pipers.
Sopa is a fairly straightforward 3D adventure game in the LucasArts tradition. Talk to the toad, find out what they want, and then give them the right item and move on to the next disaster.
Most of the games use the off-kilter comedy game logic you’ll find in your average Double Fine Adventure or Monkey Island. Problems like trying to wake a shady-looking frog with a noisy chicken, so he’ll teach you a secret knock to get into the not-so-secret gang hideout, if only you could find something the panda-loving amphibian wants.
There’s nothing too complicated, and it’s easy enough to follow the dots to the next solution. At times, I even ended up completing puzzles before I even knew I was supposed to. It’s very much a “my first adventure game” and a great title to ponder your way through with kids.
The visuals are also wonderful, featuring an art style that’s bright, beautiful, and complements its Colombian roots and sense of magical realism perfectly. It’s cast, which gives off serious Sesame Street vibes, is packed full of cheerful, charming characters, including a whole black market full of brightly coloured, insect-peddling dart frogs, and a small community of oddball castaways stuck inside the belly of a giant fish.
There’s plenty of laughs to be had in this four to five-hour adventure, and it’s well worth exhausting every dialogue option available for all the little quips and one-liners, as well as the huge hints that pretty much spell out what you have to get and where you have to go next.
Although there isn’t any voice acting per se, with each character making vague noises towards each other in the style of your average Rare game, the music is fitting and catchy, really helping to reinforce the South American setting.
The only issue I had with Sopa is that it can be quite Janky at times. Miho regularly got stuck against the scenery, and I needed to wiggle away to avoid having to reload the last checkpoint. There is a noticeable amount of texture pop-in every time you load the game, as the world is still populating itself for a few seconds before it gives you control.
Final Thoughts
Sopa Tale of the Stolen Potato, much like the soup that inspired it, is a warm and comforting experience. Light in tone, with a surprising depth of flavour, a short-lived but pleasant experience that left me wanting seconds.
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