Like A Telltale Interpretation Of A Puppet Show
As a huge fan of anything The Jim Henson Company touches, I’d love for them to adapt SOPA – Tale of the Stolen Potato. It’s made for them, and not just because of the village of cross-eyed Kermits that you visit in the beginning and end of the game.
SOPA – Tale of the Stolen Potato shares a sense of humour and keen imaginative eye with them. I could imagine every character in soft felt and flailing arms.
It certainly sounds like a shaggy dog story that Fozzy would tell. It’s about a boy, Miho, who is tasked with getting a potato from the larder for his Nana. She’s making Sancocho, a Spanish potato soup. But as soon as he reaches for a spud, the potato sack is stolen away by a bug-eyed frog. It hustles through a cupboard and into a fantasy land.
This is a Spanish Narnia of sun and frogs. Miho has to find the frog, persuade it to give up the potatoes, and get there before Nana notices he’s gone. But the frog is reluctant. You head off on wild goose chase, but the goose eggs are potatoes. What should be a simple task keeps snowballing into more and more ridiculous encounters.
The Frog, The Potato And The Wardrobe
The low-stakes storytelling is SOPA – Tale of the Stolen Potato at its best. You can tell the writers are having fun making mountains out of molehills; this shouldn’t be an epic tale, but it bumbles towards one. And it’s all over a potato.
The character designs are lovely, even if they are repeated more than we would like (the marketplace full of Kermits feels a little too much like asset-reuse rather than a living place). Even the humans look like puppets that you might want to buy and start toying around with. The environments get a little bleached out by over-eager lighting, but the centrepiece location, taking over the middle third of the game, is sensational. It’s no coincidence that it happens to be in the dark.
There’s gleeful humour here, too. While it is an absurd world, it is a real place for its inhabitants and is treated as such. Everyone’s looking to get by, whether that’s by forming Potato Gangs or learning to become a broom-whittler. There’s a lot of mileage in the way SOPA – Tale of the Stolen Potato tries to normalise its surreal ideas.
If anything, we would be eager for SOPA – Tale of the Stolen Potato to push that absurdity even further in future episodes. Thanks to a lack of budget or a fear of losing young players, StudioBando repeats itself and stays slightly too long in each location. The jokes are fantastic, but they tire slightly, as the player is asked to revisit locations or spend large amounts of time in fetch quests. We completely understand why – this is a small indie studio, not Telltale or AdHoc Studio. But it does lead to some small notes of fatigue. With a touch more willingness to take the story in odd directions, we suspect SOPA – Tale of the Stolen Potato could have done more with what it was given.
SOPA: Episode One
You might have seen that we mentioned episodes. It’s worth noting that SOPA – Tale of the Stolen Potato comes to a conclusion but not an emphatic one. There are plenty of threads to tie up and an ending cinematic that makes it abundantly clear that the team wants to do more with Miho. That makes sense considering the runtime, too. This is not a long game, and runs to the length of a The Walking Dead (Telltale version) episode. If you expected a full-blown graphic adventure, then you may be left with a sense of ‘was that it?’.
Ah yes, we’ve failed to explain what kind of game SOPA – Tale of the Stolen Potato actually is. It’s a hybrid of narrative game and graphic-adventure. It’s not quite a narrative game, because the focus is less on dialogue choice and more on wandering about. But it’s not quite a point-and-click adventure either, because there’s limited gameplay and a tiny inventory. It sits snugly in the middle with a family-friendly wrapper round it. You could plonk this in front of the kids and wander off.
SOPA – Tale of the Stolen Potato is least effective when it’s ambitious, unfortunately. When it tries to mash in some gameplay, things don’t go so well. Right at the start of the game, there’s a rapids and boat sequence that never feels right. On occasion it feels like it’s on rails, like there’s nothing you could do to fail, while on other occasions, it feels like you couldn’t do anything to avoid its rocks. It’s clumsy and awkward, sets an odd precedent and then SOPA does nothing similar to that sequence for the rest of the runtime.
The same awkwardness is true of any moment where the gameplay gets finicky. Climbing over rooftops is a stop-start, jarring affair. Maneuvering a raft with a fire extinguisher is equally so. If SOPA – Tale of the Stolen Potato gets a second outing, and we deeply hope so, we hope the controls and engine gets some love. We hit upon several bugs, one of which was a gamestopper which required a restart.
If You’re Not Loving SOPA, Wait For The Fish
SOPA – Tale of the Stolen Potato has a continual, never-absent feeling of being cumbersome. But it also has a tendency of producing sequences and puzzles that muffle it. The mid-section is lovely, a barrage of fetch-quests that – unusually for fetch quests – feels rewarding. We achieved that point-and-click Holy Grail: a complete understanding of where everything was and how it might be used, so when someone wanted a piece of music or long stick, we were already on it. We knew all the steps to get there.
Plus a wisecrack is around the corner, and if not a wisecrack then a hare-brained scheme or cross-eyed pose from the antagonist frog. There’s too much Jim Henson-like personality to hate on SOPA for long.
If you’re in the market for a Telltale-like episode of narrative goodness – and, let’s face it, Dispatch on Xbox is still a distant hope – then take a bow, SOPA – Tale of the Stolen Potato. This is not long, difficult or ambitious, but it never fails to be charming.
Important Links
A Story of Family, Adventure, and a Stolen Potato – SOPA Launches on Xbox, Game Pass and Play Anywhere – https://www.thexboxhub.com/a-story-of-family-adventure-and-a-stolen-potato-sopa-launches-on-xbox-game-pass-and-play-anywhere/
Download from the Xbox Store, through Game Pass if you like – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/sopa-tale-of-the-stolen-potato/9N221ZTFGQB0/0010
