What happens when you take the wholesome family spirit of a Ghibli movie and pair it with the sassy humour of a Pixar movie? You’d get something tonally similar to Sopa: Tale of the Stolen Potato. This delightfully quirky and uplifting adventure is 3D-ish point and click adventure that reminds me of how Escape From Monkey Island handled taking point and click adventuring into the PS2-era. Whilst the puzzles won’t cause you too many head scratches, you’ll be enthralled with its cast of characters and upbeat vibe.
We play as Miho, who is a young child helping his Grandma make her homemade soup. He isn’t a fan, but is sent to the store cupboard to fetch a potato for it. At the back of the store cupboard, you find a frog stealing your potato, and as you give chase, you’ll end up out of the back of the cupboard and into a vibrant alternative world. Sopa have two large hub environments, where you’ll spend the majority of your gameplay. The first is the Black Market, where frogs barter for deals on various goods. The second is inside a giant fish. Each has multiple screens, and the camera follows you around in fixed perspectives, shifting around the 3D environments to give you the best view. On rare occasions when Miho is close to the front of the screen, you may run into some minor issues, but the camera works well for 99% of the time. It also showcases the quirky cast of characters in a fun, cinematic tone.
Miho will have to solve a variety of puzzles to get his potato back. Picking up objects for fetch quests, combining objects in the underused inventory crafting system, and talking to other characters will solve most of the puzzles. There are some platforming and timing-based elements that pop up for variety, but Sopa rarely uses the same thing multiple times. Instead, it dovetails multiple objects and interactions together so that you run between characters and trigger certain things to happen as you complete personal tasks. This works well most of the time, but I did run into a couple of issues where I was searching for a specific item or action to move the story forward, only to realise that the next scene triggered if I left the room. Again, these are quite rare and only cause a few minor annoyances.
Inventory management is simple, and combining objects is a straightforward drag and drop. If you do get stuck, there is an objectives log that offers a story and mission recap. These provide some open questions to point you vaguely in the right direction, without giving the hint away freely. It is a good compromise, although there are no puzzles so obtuse that you’ll need a detailed walkthrough to pass them. Sopa uses clear language to drop hints about what kind of tool or object is required to complete a task, and that helps set your direction.
What Sopa lacks in location scope, it makes up for in density and detail. Running around Grandma’s house will get you told off. Most NPCs have world-building dialogue or are doing something silly. They often have slapstick comedy personality flaws, which lend well to visual comedy, and Sopa is keen to showcase their comedic talents constantly. Pair that with a vibrant, bold world, and some catchy background music, and you have a hit. I had a grin on my face from beginning to end, and this is the perfect game to cheer yourself up after a cloudy day. What makes the comedy work so well is that behind it all, there’s quite a lot of heart and soul. Grandma’s home cooking, your best friend in the garden, the watch fixer who is in complete denial about his skills, the thief attempting to have some morals… they all work as great characters and set-ups. It’s a lovely story to be told.
Sopa: Tale of the Stolen Potato stole my heart and polished it up shiny and new. Wholesome but never sickly sweet, and happy to lay out laugh after laugh, this is a great game for the family to enjoy together, or for point and click adventurers to embrace for a weekend of light puzzle solving. Delightful from start to end, I’ll never look at a frog’s face in the same way again…
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