The first thing to hit you about Once Upon a Puppet is that it is a visually striking game, taking the 2.5D stylings of Little Nightmares and adding a gorgeous wooden aesthetic on top. What truly surprised me, though, was the emotionally touching story that it told. Issues of grief, regret, and reconciliation are played out through a metaphorical narrative of puppets and adventure.
The world of Once Upon a Puppet is strictly divided into two areas, the regular areas and the Understage to which those out of favour with the King are banished. As the game begins we discover that the current King is throwing everything that annoys him into the Understage, and while he initially appears to be a tyrant abusing his power, we come to discover the tragic reason for this as the story progresses. We immediately face this through Nieve, a Stagehand (literally just a sentient glove) who has disappointed the King with their latest design. Once thrown into the Understage, Nieve becomes magically entwined with the puppet Drev, and they have to set out on an adventure to uncover the mystery that has brought them together.
The dual character protagonist is an interesting approach and enables some effective mechanical complexities. You control Drev with the left stick, whilst Nieve is mapped to the right. Most of the time you can just navigate the world as Drev, but there are interactions and puzzles that involved both characters to be controlled. At first you have only very basic controls and must find magical spools to expand your abilities so that by the end you’ll be double jumping, gliding, wielding a bow, and more. All of these abilities are tested through complex environmental puzzles which form the main body of the gameplay.
The theatrical setting for the game is not just a backdrop. Drev is an actor puppet and can be dressed as different characters to access new areas – although Nieve needs to sew them up first. While some of these are purely cosmetic, others link into specific performance memories and affect dialogue with NPCs. The effect is more linear than this sounds, though, as there are no dialogue choices to uncover. Instead there is a well-written and crafted narrative that provides the emotional drive for the game.
Once Upon a Puppet features no real combat, but isn’t a game without peril or danger. Some intricate platforming challenges abound as well as avoiding the evil creatures and lethal pools of black goo (identified as stage-fright) that litter the corrupted Understage. The former must be avoided through stealth for the most part (although late in the game you obtain a power that is effective against them) whilst stage-fright is destroyed by light.
Some of the most memorable setpieces in the game involve rearranging stage sets to recover one of the King’s lost memories. These environmental puzzles generally involve all of the various skills and are particularly rewarding. Successfully completing one of these leads to Drev taking the spotlight and revealing a key aspect of the game’s deeper narrative. There is a mystery running through the game that is fundamental to the narrative that I won’t spoil here but I did guess it fairly early on. That being said, the eventual reveal was emotionally effective still and led to a satisfying conclusion.
I played through on a Switch 2 and it suited the handheld really well, but there was an annoying bug late on where dying to a particularly tight timing puzzle broke the camera and necessitated a restart. This solved the checkpointing but I reloaded the level more than once before realising that closing the game and reloading it was the solution. This was the only real moment of frustration though.
