5 days ago
You Have One Week To Play A Perfect Video Game Before It Disappears Indefinitely
Poinpy is an absolutely perfect video game, and you only have a few days left to play it.
The very best new video game I played in 2022 wasn't God of War: Ragnarok or Horizon Forbidden West. Nor was it PowerWash Simulator or Rollerdrome (as great as all four of those are). Instead, it was a perfectly realized mobile game. And it's one that's about to vanish into the ether for the time being.
Let me tell you about Poinpy. It's a platforming game designed by Downwell creator Ojiro Fumoto and Team Poinpy. While Downwell was all about, uh, going down, Poinpy sees you ascending through a variety of environments using a combination of jumps and strategic bounces.
Along the way, you'll have to collect fruit to make juice to satiate the blue beast that's facing you. Otherwise, you will fall victim to the monster's fiery wrath.
Time slows down as you line up each jump, giving you a few precious extra seconds to find the right angle. You'll have a limited number of jump orbs you can use before you have to touch the ground. Once you've collected the right ingredients, touching the ground completes a fruit juice cocktail and resets your jump orbs. You can also restore a jump orb by slamming down on an enemy or pot.
This is a roguelike, meaning that while there are a number of biomes with their own distinct elements, each run is different. The placement of fruit, enemies and obstacles will never be the same between runs. You can unlock permanent upgrades and choose between various power-ups
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Poinpy is a perfect game. Fumoto and his team get everything exactly right here. Their vision for the game is crystal clear and they realized that faultlessly. The visuals are adorably colorful and the soundtrack from Calum Bowen (aka Bo En) is a real treat.
The difficulty scaling is on point and, most importantly, Poinpy is a delight to play. Make it to the end and you'll get to experience a terrific, oddly devastating ending as well as a lovely post-credits sequence and an endless mode.
But there is going to be an end to this, regrettably. The only way to play Poinpy at the minute is on an iOS or Android device. And you'll also need to be a Netflix subscriber to play it.
As noted by Ryan Brown (the head of Lost In Cult's publishing label, Editions, which is largely focused on game preservation) on X, Netflix is removing Poinpy from its catalog on June 9. Publisher Devolver Digital confirmed on Discord that Netflix's licensing agreement for Poinpy is coming to an end, three years after the game's debut.
After June 9, there won't be any way to play Poinpy until it's ported to other platforms. There's currently no timeline for when that might happen.
"For the time being, Poinpy will become unavailable, and we know this sucks," a Devolver representative wrote on the publisher's official Discord server. "With how these integrations work, Poinpy will require further development in order to be releasable in other stores, and realistically we do not know when we would have time in-between other projects. Ojiro and us at Devolver hope to be able to release the game on other platforms in the future, but we do not have any news regarding this currently."
This is such a bummer. I often dip into Poinpy to play a run or two. It's such a soothing, delightful experience and I'm so sad that I won't be able to play it for the foreseeable future. While some games certainly would not exist without the financial backing from the likes of Netflix Games, Apple Arcade and Game Pass, it stinks to see some of these works of art vanish when they leave these subscription services.
Even with the Nintendo Switch 2 coming out this week and Summer Game Fest taking up much of my time this weekend, I'll be playing Poinpy as much as I can until June 9. I'd encourage you to do the same as well. I don't think you'll regret giving it a go.
I hope that enough people check out Poinpy over the next week to show decision makers it's worthwhile to retool the game for the Apple App Store, Google Play Store and/or other platforms sooner rather than later.
As soon as it's available elsewhere, I'll snap it up with no hesitation. If and when that happens, it could help this wonderful game find a far larger audience. In the meantime, I'm going to be waiting impatiently for Poinpy's return.
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