Popo's Tower

My first twenty minutes with Popo's Tower were an honest argument with myself about whether to quit. The wall-running clicked wrong, the double-jump felt stubborn, and the camera kept deciding it knew better than I did. Then something shifted -- one clean diagonal wall-run into a ledge grab into a dropkick arc -- and the whole thing snapped into place. That particular alchemy is exactly what Sokpop does, and it is worth the patience it demands. The game is the work of Tom van den Boogaart, one quarter of the Utrecht-based Sokpop Collective, a group built around what they call an infinite game jam -- releasing small, handcrafted games on a rapid schedule. Popo's Tower carries every mark of that philosophy: a lo-fi 3D aesthetic built from flat unlit shading and a downscaled resolution that gives the island a soft, slightly dreamlike quality, somewhere between a faded postcard and a Studio Ghibli background. The developer has cited ICO, Porco Rosso, and Super Mario 64 as reference points, and you can feel each of those things at different moments without the game feeling derivative. The stranded pilot protagonist -- and their battered red airplane waiting on the shore -- adds just enough melancholy narrative weight to make the climbing feel purposeful rather than purely athletic. The movement set is the whole conversation here. You start with a basic jump and ledge grab, then progressively unlock a double jump, a dropkick, and horizontal wall-running that lets you skirt tower faces sideways rather than straight up. Six hidden collectibles are tucked into corners that reward people who actually look around. The momentum system has a real flaw worth naming: if you try to redirect mid-air with a double jump or a dive kick, your velocity resets to near-zero. Players who come from momentum-based platformers will find this jarring. Wall-exit direction is also locked to the opposite vector, which occasionally makes routing feel more restrictive than intended. These are genuine criticisms, not nitpicks. The camera, patched across several updates post-launch, is stable now in ways it was not at release -- a respawn-relative reset helped enormously -- but the vertical look range remains tight, which can cause you to miss a collectible hanging above the sightline. What the game gets right, it gets genuinely right. The soundscape -- ambient audio layered into specific areas, crisp interaction cues, a score that sits quietly enough to let the wind do most of the emotional work -- is the kind of thing you only notice when it stops. The island is small but it has a sense of place, a mystery to it that the sparse storyline never over-explains. Runtime sits between thirty minutes and just over an hour depending on whether you chase all six collectibles. For a game at this price tier, that is the correct length. A longer version of this would risk exposing exactly the movement friction that a short, tightly paced run keeps forgivable. Popo's Tower knows when it's done, and it stops. Kai, Scout Team

Runs flawlessly on Linux out of the box. Based on 3 ProtonDB community reports.

Be the first to comment on Popo's Tower.