I am lucky enough to be totally ignorant of what it is like to grow up with parents who were anything other than loving and kind. The first indication I ever had that people around me may not have been was when a friend told me she used to hide in the closet as a young child to escape her drug-addicted father’s rampages.
That story came immediately to mind as I began a game of Papo & Yo, because that’s the game’s first scene: A child, huddled in the closet, watching through the slats of the door as the shadow of his father stomps by. The child escapes into his imagination: a door magically opens on the closet wall behind him and he darts through it, into a world over which he can exercise some form of control.
Papo & Yo, a downloadable game released earlier this month for PlayStation 3, is something commonplace in other art forms but comparatively rare in videogames, an attempt by an artist to exorcise his own demons through his chosen form of expression. Creator Vander Caballero has done the big-budget game song and dance — he was design director on Electronic Arts’ bombastic shooter Army of Two — and has left that behind to run a small design studio with the goal of making games with considerably less technical prowess but a great deal more of artistic ambition.
“It is a beauty to be able, as an artist, to go deep inside of your emotions and transform them into art,” Caballero told Wired at the E3 Expo in June. “Not many people get that opportunity in the game development community. You wake up in the morning and you go to work and you do a game about shooting minorities.”
Papo & Yo is an allegorical tale of Caballero’s childhood: Quico is a young boy constantly followed around by a gigantic monster. The monster is mostly benign. Sometimes he sleeps peacefully, and the boy can climb on his belly. But when the monster sees a poisonous green frog, he has no choice but to eat it, and this sends him into a rage, hurting everything around him. Quico wants to find a way to cure Monster of his problem.
Caballero cites the Japanese Sony game Ico as his main source of gameplay inspiration (it’s even echoed, whether intentionally or subconsciously, in the main character’s name). Like Ico, Papo & Yo is an environmental puzzle game — the player explores imaginative places, learning how to manipulate machinery and pathways in such a way that both he and Monster can advance to the next area.
The environment design is quite clever, and beautiful to watch in motion: The areas are modeled after favelas, but in Quico’s mind he can manipulate the rickety buildings with sidewalk chalk and cardboard boxes. Houses might be made to walk on spindly white legs; a whole tower of water tanks might be built and stretched and twisted to form a walkway.
I think I understand why. People tend to not finish the videogames they start. It seems as if the design team consciously stripped the friction out of Papo so that players would be more likely to follow the story through to its dramatic conclusion. (Sophie Prell at Penny Arcade has a solid, spoiler-filled, analysis of the game’s final act.)
Although I was really anticipating Papo & Yo, I had other obligations and got to the game late. After I finished it, I saw that other critics who had weighed in all generally agreed that its lack of challenge had hurt it; without challenge you never get that exhilarating feeling of triumph.
But I also discovered that playing the game late had unexpected benefits. Early review copies of Papo & Yo were apparently plagued with bugs that, in multiple instances, were bad enough to cause players to have to restart their games from the beginning. By the time I got to the game, it had been patched and I encountered no such problems.
I was intrigued by the gameplay in Papo & Yo, not for its challenge but for (what I perceived as?) the integrity of its metaphor. When you, as Quico, chase after a frog and kill it by splatting it against the wall, it’s easy to imagine a young Caballero pouring his dad’s whiskey down the sink drain.
Papo & Yo lingers after you finish it, not merely because of the powerful subject matter but because there are unanswered questions. I’m still left wondering, for instance, about the meaning of two dreamlike real-world sequences that are disconnected, at least superficially, from the rest of the story.
There’s also the matter of the girl character, Alejandra. In the story, she serves the purpose of moving the plot along, telling Quico and by extension the player what needs to be done to save Monster. But when Monster grabs her, he treats her in a starkly different manner than he does Quico. The ending scenes reinforce this idea, but stop short of explaining it.
“Um, what did his father do to the girl in real life?” asked a fan on Twitter.
“There is no answer for that,” replied a representative of the developer, “but Alejandra is based on Vander’s first love.”
Even in a game that deals so unflinchingly with abuse, some stories aren’t ready to be told.
WIRED Dares to attempt to create a commercial game with a serious message. Beautiful shantytown environments. Fantastic guitar soundtrack. Will stick with you long after you finish.
TIRED Rough around the edges. Never feels challenging, so it lacks exhilarating highs.
Rating: 
$15, Minority
