SOPA: Tale of the Stolen Potato review

• Reviews by Brian Hobbs
• Published:

Family-friendly Pixar-like journey through a magical Latin-flavored world has all the right ingredients

One glance at the screenshots for SOPA: Tale of the Stolen Potato, with the expressive charm, familial warmth, and childlike wonder radiating out of every colorful 3D character and scene, and I immediately thought of Pixar. Indeed, this South American magical-realist adventure by StudioBando was inspired by Pixar’s Coco, alongside other classics like Spirited Away and The Little Prince. That’s quite the line-up to compare against, and while it doesn’t quite measure up to the richness and depth of its influences, SOPA’s blend of nostalgia, humor, and playfulness is nothing short of a delight that the whole family can (and did, in my case) enjoy together.

It all starts with a scenario that’s familiar to many of our childhoods: You play as Miho, a young boy helping his nana make a soup that she seems rather excited about, but he’s not so sure, because it contains such ghastly ingredients as potatoes and cilantro. When she asks him to get her a potato from the pantry, wouldn’t you know it, a criminal frog thief appears through a portal and takes the whole sack. Like always, am I right? Naturally enough, your nana will have exactly none of that as an excuse, so off you go through the portal to a magical rainforest of talking beasts and tuber crime rings to recover the all-important ingredient.

During your culinary quest, you’ll talk to all sorts of colorful characters, gather up items, and solve puzzles in typical point-and-click fashion, but without all that pointing and clicking. Miho is controlled directly with either keyboard or gamepad, and as you move around, icons appear over anything you can interact with, prompting a related button press. Technically, “mouse and keyboard” is one of the two control schemes, but I didn’t notice the mouse serving much purpose beyond clicking the action icons when they appeared, which is just as easily accomplished with the press of a space bar, so I don’t know how necessary it is, and I stuck mostly to the controller option.

The puzzles in SOPA aren’t very difficult but aren’t effortless either, and a couple of them had me scratching my head for a few minutes. Still, the overall challenge level is low enough to keep the pace moving, which is helpful when you’ve got your children as an audience. Also helpful is that the scenarios are often creative and humorous. How do you haggle with a couple of competing frog ferrymen when you have absolutely nothing of value to offer them for their services? Can you grow a plant inside of a fish? Where can you find a panda cute enough that even the most hardened criminal can’t resist spilling his secrets? And to think you just need a potato.

SOPA: Tale of the Stolen Potato

Genre:	Fantasy
Presentation:	Realtime 3D
Theme:	Magical, Other worlds/dimensions, Animal, Family
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Stylized
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Direct Control
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Medium

The lush, vibrant visuals look like something out of a 3D-animated feature and are dripping with color and warmth. I don’t know what Miho’s problem is – I would happily eat anything my nana cooked up in a cozy Colombian kitchen like that, sunlight streaming in through the windows, bathing it all in an orange glow. Even the shady insect market buried deep in the magical rainforest is immediately appealing with the rich green of the trees surrounding a bustling network of wooden stalls and catwalks as frogs hawk their wares with playful and lively animations. A later journey into the belly of a fish is the only location where the visual design was a little flat and didn’t quite measure up to the rest, but that’s only because the bar was set pretty high elsewhere.

Although most of the gameplay involves inventory obstacles, the free 3D movement is used to good effect in a few places, like navigating a raft on a river or pushing furniture back and forth as you hunt for a lost item. It’s not full of action (though the river ride comes close), but directly controlling Miho as he happily bounds around adds a joyful immediacy to your adventure. Wreaking a bit of havoc around your nana’s house by running into shelves and cupboards while she makes off-screen comments about your mischief is an especially nice touch. The camera automatically follows along, swooping, zooming and panning as you navigate the environment. It occasionally has a bit of trouble keeping up in some places or puts a foreground object in the way, but nothing too egregious and I found it a small price to pay for the dynamic feel of having a moving camera.

SOPA’s score is comprised of a handful of Latin American instrumental songs that really help set a lively regional tone with peppy cumbia and mariachi style, even if there aren’t that many tracks. Along with environmental ambience and other sound effects, the characters are each voiced with a gibberish to go along with the dialogue text, which gives them extra personality but can get a little repetitive over longer periods of conversation. While that’s really just a nitpick, I can’t help but imagine how much more full voice acting would add to the experience, as there are so many diverse and comical characters with great lines that would be fun to hear spoken.

Even still, chatting up the locals is a particular highlight and where much of the humor shines. You’ll often be given three short responses to choose from during conversation. Some of these will prove important for making progress, but many are there just to give you something snarky to say. The writing is surprisingly funny even for an adult, and we all laughed out loud more than a few times at the absurd situations and tongue-in-cheek humor. The cast of characters ranges from a frog mafia to a washed-up accordion player to a floating blob with a hat who simply goes by “Jellyman.” It’s truly creative and charming the whole way through, though I have to admit that the Pixar-like aesthetic and the fact that the developers described it as an “emotional narrative adventure” made me expect more pulling of heartstrings. While fun and occasionally nostalgic, you aren’t likely to need any tissues for this one. But I suppose amusement is an emotion?

That said, it’s clear that the overall narrative isn’t finished. Although the immediate conflict finds a resolution after around five hours, there are things introduced in the last five minutes of the game that point to a broader and deeper story that could easily dive into more poignant territory. These additional hints are intriguing, if a little vague. After the credits, my family and I reloaded our save and played through the ending again in the hopes that maybe we would understand a little more of what we saw. Alas, we are none the wiser, but would happily jump into a second game to experience additional chapters of Miho’s adventures.

Final Verdict

There are enough well-chosen ingredients in SOPA: Tale of the Stolen Potato to make it a winning dish for the whole family. The puzzles are meaty enough to provide at least a small bite of challenge for the seasoned adventurer, and the bright colors, fun characters, and quick pace will keep the kids and the young at heart coming back for seconds. Sprinkle that with some charming visuals and genuinely funny humor, and the recipe is winning enough that it’s a shame it had to end so soon. Although the narrative stops short of having any real emotional impact and ends on something of a cliffhanger, what’s here is more than enough to make me and my family hope we’ll see more of Miho and his nana in the future. One helping of SOPA was only enough to whet our appetite for more.

Brian played SOPA: Tale of the Stolen Potato on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.