Sometimes you stumble upon projects that you can’t help but respect the dedication and effort put by their creators into it. Yet understand that the end result of all that dedication and effort is, while impressive, not very good. Papetura is one such example. Reminiscent of the impressive fluid clay animations of The Neverhood, except with paper. And except not exciting and not fun to play.
Papetura is a point and click adventure game where most if not all visual elements of were handcrafted out of paper. And it does look impressive and very nicely put together visually. Especially when you consider that all of the game, but the sound and music, was done by one developer going by Petums. The sound design by Juraj Mravec is cute and the music by the legendary Tomáš Dvořák (Floex) is not his best, but very good nonetheless.
But it’s a point and click adventure game first and foremost. And it’s not fun to play. Vast majority of the “puzzles” in the game are more or less tedious tasks, some involving repeating the same action over and over again, some just waiting a whole lot while nothing is happening. Some “puzzles” simply make no sense unless you check the hints system, because of really poor visual guide. And sometimes you stumble upon some random not obvious thing you can do, do it, because you think it’s some sort of cute bonus, and then realize that you’ve just solved a game critical “puzzle” that you had to do.
Now, it’s not like the already mentioned The Neverhood was a great game – it had lots of poor gameplay sequences and puzzles. But what it also had was excitement, creativity, energy, fun. There’s none of that here. Papetura is “cute”. The story is simply present and is all style over substance, with no sense to this paper world. Scenes simply happen with no good pace or structure. And there’s nothing here that could define the game, even the cool idea with the main type of interaction of the game never feels like it’s used in any interesting way.
It’s a shame, but I simply cannot recommend Papetura. I could understand if someone wishes buy the game just to support the impressive undertaking, but don’t expect to have fun with the game.