Poco is a game funded by Kickstarter and released for free on its release to the wider world. It is often a gift to get a totally free product, especially when it doesn’t contain microtransactions or other data/advert harvesting mechanics. Poco has none of that. It is a charming and oddball point-and-click adventure about friendship, aspirations, and talent.
Playing as Poco, you are a circus clown kicked out of the circus in the sky and down to the guttered land below when your talents aren’t deemed good enough. This opening scene introduces three minigames that will crop up later on to solve a few puzzles. One is a Simon Says colour block memory game, one is a mouse clicking rhythm game, and the last is a speed test to rotate your mouse around a circle dial at a specific speed. None of these are hugely complicated, although a late-game rhythm puzzle may take non-rhythm gamers a couple of tries to clear. These minigames pepper the other fetch quest, hidden object, colour mixing, pipeline spinning and more traditional puzzles dotted across Poco to keep gameplay fresh and varied.
You’ll discover various characters on your journey to help you build a rocket to get you back up to the circus in the sky. Each one has its own set of puzzles to solve, involving all those quests listed earlier. As you have free rein in where you go, you might encounter and run several characters’ puzzles simultaneously, and it feels natural to juggle multiple quests at one time. The world is beautifully quirky, as are its characters, and no screen is a filler. Whilst this can mean a bit of back-and-forth fetch questing happens early on, you’ll get items that unlock shortcuts. Unlock a washing machine door to jump from one place to another, for example, instead of running around forest paths. It feels like player agency and friction have been accounted for in the world design, making Poco effortless to traverse. The same can be said for the inventory, which is a simple open-and-select affair. If you want to try out different objects, you can do that quickly without any long animations or reopening the inventory. Again, this helps solve things quickly.
Conversation trees are small, but do exist, allowing players to choose subtopics for more information. I’d have liked a little more from this across the full game, as Poco instead often relies on visual cues to spot parts of items lying in bushes, treetops, or by the side of the road. The artwork is vivid and stylised, reminding me a bit of Aminita Designs crossed with a Deponia game. This is 99% of the time fantastic, but occasionally, interactive objects aren’t as obvious as some other games make them. I’ve thought about this after completing Poco, and I think if you deploy the click everything strategy that works for more point-and-click games, it’s not a problem. I’d also like to shout out the incredible way the music changes its main theme scene to scene and screen to screen by switching genre and instrumentation.
It blows me away that Poco is out for free for the general public. It is a fantastic 2-hour slice of point-and-click adventure that uses its story, aesthetic, and quirky vibes to sell a world that I wanted to stay in long after. I hope the developer’s next effort is one that goes out for commercial sale beyond a Kickstarter so that we can nurture and support talented developers and artists like this. I’d happily pay my hard-earned cash for more time in the Poco world, or something else from the dev.
Higher Plain Games is part of the Higher Plain Network. If you like what I do, please consider supporting me via Patreon for as little as $1/£1 a month. There are additional perks for supporting me, such as behind-the-scenes content and downloads. You can also share the website or use the affiliate buy now links on reviews. Buying credit from CD Keys using my affiliate link means I get a couple of pence per sale. All your support will enable me to produce better content, more often. Thank you.
