Family recipes are very important things, often passed down through the family and frequently wrapped up in memories. Sopa follows Miha, a young boy who is suddenly whisked away to a magical world while helping his grandmother with ingredients for a soup.
Sopa is two different stories smashed together. The first is a beautiful adventure-puzzle experience where you explore magical worlds of talking frogs and giant, psychedelic wolves, finding items and objects to help people and help you gather food to help your grandmother’s cooking. The second is a story of family growing old, and our moments together in time passing us by faster than we can value, of maturity, getting old, and loss. The trailer touches on it better than I probably can, with Miha’s TV cutting out and so him having to leave his world of cartoons to help his grandmother, only to be dragged off into a world of wonderful, colourful imagination and not realising that the world is changing around him.
For anybody who has lost a family member, it’s a very stark and sad message, one that really contrasts with some of the vivid, bright worlds that you explore. I can’t help but feel that it’s about a rite of passage, a maturity, a loss of innocence and that realisation of mortality — but, maybe I’m looking into it too much. The developers, StudioBando, cite a few different inspirations for Sopa; Coco, The Little Prince and the work of Hayao Miyazaki. Each of these (and Miyazaki’s greater works) have a whole slew of trends running through them, but perhaps the most obvious is that of child protagonists, magical worlds and traditions made by those older than them. Regardless of which elements are actually taken and rolled up into Sopa, it’s always refreshing to see a piece of media cite things from other mediums as inspiration.
But, prattling on about inspirations and messaging aside, I want to talk about Sopa‘s feel. I was lucky enough to play it while at The Mix Showcase at GDC after being almost magnetised to the screen as I passed. On-screen the young protagonist was running around a pier-set marketplace, one populated and staffed by humanoid frogs. There was an absolutely amazing colour pallette on display, with bright blue doors and the ocean under the pier, orange and browns in the building walls, wooden pier planks and woodlands surrounding the bay, and popping greens in the lush tree-tops and wacky frog-folk wandering the bay.
Playing it felt great too, all of the characters have what can only be described as flappy arms. Everything feels almost over-animated, in that regard, but it makes it a total joy to run around — even when you’re not sure where you’re going. I started playing the demo from a point slightly further in the game, in the frog town and without much direction, however, there were a fair few places and beings that I could interact with, and they quickly got me back on the right route. The writing was clever, toeing the line between clever and silly that most early point and click adventures had, and many of the puzzles presented themselves in a way where more thinking was required in getting the items than identifying the items required… The whole thing felt welcoming and warm.
I was enamoured with the small slice of Sopa that I got to play, and have to admit that I’m excited to see more of it, especially as I feel like it’s been set up to feature lots of individual experiences away from Grandma’s Kitchen, including the world of endless deserts, the place of floating mountains, and more. We’ll just have to wait to see them.
Sopa is currently expected to release for Xbox One and Xbox Series S/X, as well as Windows PCs, in 2023
