We Need To Talk About Poinpy
Hey everyone! I’ve been spinning several plates at once since finishing my travelogue. None of them are done yet but I need to jump into your inbox ahead of any of that and talk about one of my favourite games while I still can.
Poinpy is a vertically-scrolling 2D platformer designed by Ojiro Fumoto (Downwell) where you swipe in one direction to aim Poinpy and their rocket in the opposite one. You try to chain bouncing on enemies, pots and walls to gather all of the fruit in a recipe without touching the ground. The levels are randomly generated, but there are five distinctly-themed areas with their own additional mechanics to keep things exciting as you progress.
A roguelike, you level up between attempts depending on how many requests you fulfilled on a run. These tend to be either Jump Orbs, letting you swipe one more time before gravity sets in, equipment slots to fill with optional upgrades, or batches of Golden Seeds that you can use in the slot machine in the hub to buy said upgrades. You can also find one or two seeds inside of pots while playing, but you’ll need these windfalls as the machine’s prices keep rising the more you use it. My favourite of these enhancements is the Mummy Plushie, which fulfills a recipe when you take damage. Useful when time is running out when doing some of the complex requests.
It’s a simple game but an endearing one, packed with error403’s vibrant art and Calum Bowen’s chipper soundtrack. The physics are perfect, never feeling uncontrollable even as you pinball around the world. What little writing the game has is just as fun, with easy to understand descriptions for the upgrades and tongue-in-cheek personalities for the characters. And that’s not mentioning the puzzle levels themed around each area you can unlock that teach you more advanced ways of playing by limiting your jumps to the bare minimum. There is no single part of Poinpy that I could put above the rest and that’s why it’s one of my favourite games ever.
Before I let you go, I want to talk about one tiny detail. In the cloudy tutorial, you have to stomp on switches to unlock the next part of it. These switches are blue, which is odd as they resemble the classic big red buttons used as visual shorthand in so many mediums. Once you’re through the opening and in the hub, there’s no clear direction as to what to do. You can go to the left and find a slot machine that wants 10 of an unknown currency to operate and you can go to the right and find a clearing with light shining from on high, too high for you to climb at the moment. In the centre lies a sleeping creature. You can jump up off-screen if you want to, but you’ll just fall back down onto the creature. The creature…it’s blue.
I think I accidentally triggered it the first time I played, but teaching that you need to stomp on the blue creature to start the game by gating progression in the tutorial behind stomping on blue switches is now one of my favourite examples of a tutorial. Also I will not that an arrow and a little drawing of Poinpy appear above the creature’s head after a short time, but do not believe they were there when I first played.
I had hoped to leave talking about this game until my eventual retrospective on Netflix Games, but time is not on my side. When I checked Netflix in my browser today, I saw that the game was “leaving soon”, meaning that its licence was set to expire. The company’s creation and decimation of their games branch in the last half-decade has been a remarkable thing, so when Netflix is deleting their own games and ransacking their own acquired studios in favour of AI, I do doubt that renewing Poinpy’s license is a top priority. The game launched in June 2022 and I expect it will be delisted in June 2025, three years on.
Currently, there is no way to play Poinpy without logging into a Netflix subscription in the game’s front-end. I reached out to Devolver to see if they have any plans for making the game playable in the future and they said “We do plan on making sure it's available on mobile after but there will be a gap between Apple Arcade and a premium mobile release due to some extenuating circumstances.”
Unsure why Apple Arcade was mentioned in the reply, but the Netflix Games and Apple Arcade platforms were identical for a time so I think they got their wires crossed. In any case, I’d snap up a premium phone release but could also see the touchscreen gameplay translating to flicking a stick or swiping a mouse fairly well. I’d be there day one for a Switch 2 port too.
This was a short and scattershot article, as all I really wanted to say was “play Poinpy”. Download it off the app store, log in with whoever’s subscription and play it while you can. Thanks to my save data randomly vanishing a few times, I’ve played it from start to end at least three times and my love hasn’t waned.
Play Poinpy. My final message. Goodbye.
Poinpy is a 2D platformer developed by Ojiro Fumoto (Downwell) with 22nd Century Toys and published by Devolver Digital for Netflix on mobile platforms. If you would like to support Memory Card, consider subscribing on Patreon or sending a one-time donation, as well as sharing this article with others.
