EGX Hands-On: Poncho

A little robot’s quest to find his father.

There are lots of major open world games around, allowing you to explore at your leisure.  These mostly take the form of action games, like Grand Theft Auto.  We’ve never come across an open world platformer before, but Poncho, a game being developed by Delve Interactive, is exactly that.

Poncho is a puzzle-platformer which sees you control a small robot who is wearing the eponymous poncho.  It take place in a post apocalyptic Earth, where Mankind no longer exists, and the robots they created are left behind to fend for themselves in a world of ruins and forest.  Your aim is to find your father, who has gone missing.

As previously stated, Poncho is open world, which means you can go wherever you like.  There’s no levels, you just walk and jump around, trying to find your father.  The game takes place over three planes, which you can switch to whenever you have room.  And indeed, you need to use this plane shift ability to advance.  There’s no combat in the game, but there are several puzzles to figure out in order to navigate.  For example, one particularly tricky situation we found involved a series of platforms across a chasm that shifted between planes.  In order to cross, you have to watch the patterns in which the platforms move.  However, you do not shift planes with the platform you are on, so you need to jump before the platform moves.

All of this is set to a charming, retro looking graphical style, with lost looking robots meandering around the landscape, thinking out loud.  Some of their comments are funny, while some of them are sad.  And it has a fitting soundtrack to go with it.  All in all, we found Poncho to be a charming and challenging game, from what we’ve played.  If you like your tricky, thinking platformers, then Poncho could be just what you’re looking for.

At the time of writing, Poncho is up on Kickstarter and has just over 48 hours left to fund.  You can check out the Kickstarter page, which includes a short alpha demo of the game, by clicking here.  You can also find out more at the official Poncho website by clicking here.

There’s a gameplay video of the game, complete with commentary by one of the developers, below.