Once Upon A Puppet

I went in expecting a pleasant diversion - the kind of 2.5D platformer you finish on a Sunday afternoon and forget by Tuesday. What I got instead was one of the more emotionally considered small-studio debuts I've sat with this year. Once Upon a Puppet is the first game from Flatter Than Earth, and the weight of eight years of craft shows in almost every visual frame, even when the seams occasionally fray at the edges. The setup is pure theater-kid mythology: Nieve, a living stagehand (literally a sentient floating glove), gets exiled to the Understage by a king whose grief has curdled into tyranny. Down there she gets magically tethered to Drev, a wooden puppet with an actor's hungry ambition and a candle stub melted onto his head. The dual-character control is the game's smartest idea - left stick and trigger for Drev, right stick and trigger for Nieve - which means you're genuinely puppeteering both of them in real time. At first this feels a little awkward and disjointed, which is the point. As the characters grow to trust each other, coordinating them starts to feel fluent. New abilities unlock from magical spools at steady intervals: a double jump, a string-catapult that flings Drev across wide gaps, gliding, and eventually a bow. Each one lands at a story beat that earns it rather than just dropping a new tool in your lap. The world split between polished Front Stage and the ruined Understage is not just decoration. The pristine surfaces above represent a society terrified of imperfection; the cobbled scaffolding below is where everything discarded ends up, including people. The game threads grief, self-doubt, and the cost of impossible standards through its nine chapters without ever getting preachy about it. Drev's 'Lost Act' costumes - unlockable outfits representing past theatrical roles - quietly deepen his character arc, and NPC dialogue in the Understage's towns and slums is surprisingly well-written for a platformer of this scale. Completionists who hunt stained-glass fragment collectibles will find extra lore vignettes that pay off the world's backstory. The theatrical score, composed by Arkadiusz Reikowski, sits perfectly in the background: mellow, wooden, a little mournful. Every movement Drev makes clunks and rattles like a real marionette, which is a sound detail I noticed immediately and appreciated all the way to the credits. The honest caveats: the platforming itself is firmly in Little Nightmares or Inside territory, familiar and rarely demanding until a jarring difficulty spike lands in the third act. Precision timing sequences arrive suddenly after hours of gentle pacing, and one-hit-kill enemies combined with occasionally distant checkpoints make those sections more frustrating than atmospheric. Some players have reported bugs, stuck hitboxes, and physics puzzles that need a full restart to resolve - on PC the framerate holds better than console reports suggest, but the underlying jank is there. The final few chapters also lean too heavily on a single ability after the new-unlock rhythm stops, which makes the back stretch feel thinner than the first two-thirds. The runtime sits around six hours, which feels exactly right for the story being told, even if the linear structure leaves no room to wander.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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