‘Papo & Yo’ E3 Trailer Adds Some Cultural Intrigue

Since being announced at last year’s E3 show, Papo & Yo has become an increasingly interesting game for an assortment of reasons. First off is its weird and wonderful world; a quasi-Columbian slum with colorful favelas to meander through, used as part of the game’s environment-based puzzle design. Though the manipulation of the surroundings can be impressive, it’s actually quite a simple concept we’ve seen many times before in a different skin. As far as spectacle goes though, it’s pretty great stuff.

Behind all of this arbitrary gameplay design is something much more painful. Papo & Yo is a personal tale of childhood abuse; derived from creator Vander Caballero’s early years with an alcoholic father. This is realized in the game through Vander as the protagonist Quico and his monster-friend who, upon eating too many frogs, turns into a frightful force of destruction. Quico has other friends who help him too, as part of the puzzles but also in healing this worrying childhood.

That’s the kind of auteurism that pangs a game with some bite, though it’s not made known to the player unless they research the game and discover interviews that bring up the subject. In-game, this serves merely as inspiration, given the game a metaphor hidden from the player. Hopefully they will feel the pain and fear though.

Then we have this latest E3 trailer, displayed before us a whole year after the game’s initial introduction to us. What it seems to add is less of this painful back story and, surprisingly, less focus on the game’s puzzles. Instead, we have a rich culture imbued into the game – that of the game’s setting and its protagonist. The beginning of the trailer showcases Quico’s other-worldly trip around the favelas as nothing more than a school boy but by the trailer’s end we see him made up as a tribesman. Our presumptions are that his journey has led him to become a warrior, bearing in mind the abusive childhood lingering in the background.

Well that’s our reading of it any way but it’s definitely a fresh feeling that we’re being offered. A rarely seen injection of culture into a puzzle game. Papo & Yo is increasingly layered with plenty of of good stuff, meaning that if the puzzles remain only as spectacle there should be plenty of other things to get our teeth into.

Papo & Yo is a PSN exlusive and will release sometime in 2012.