You may have seen this article floating around the gaming biz internet that first originated on Gamasutra's community blogs, where an enterprising fellow had taken the time to figure out what Steam's "diamonds in the rough" were by searching Steam's database for games with a sufficiently small number of reviews to escape the notice of Steam's "Mostly/Very/Overwhelmingly Positive" review system that were nonetheless almost universally glowing. I imagine these games are legion as Steam is a very difficult place to get noticed, especially if you're a small dev who gets lost in a churning ocean of awful asset flips, one-joke meme games and other detritus that has slipped past Valve's woefully inadequate quality control. The article's a fascinating read as it speculates why these games flew under the radar and the author details his process of refining the search parameters for different outcomes, but perhaps what's more compelling is the list of games it highlights: I personally added over a dozen of them to my wishlist after learning more about them from their Steam pages, many of which were visual novels, puzzle games and platformers. One name in particular stood out as particularly well-received by the small number who had bought and reviewed it: Wuppo.

Created by a small Dutch team, Wuppo has an expressive and thick-bordered MS Paint art direction and styles itself an exploratory platformer (of the type I usually dub spacewhippers), both of which immediately brought to mind the excellent and obscure An Untitled Story: an early game from Matt "MattMakesGames" Thorsen, the creator of TowerFall. Wuppo also distinctly reminds me of the older Dizzy games, insomuch as it combines classic adventure game and platformer game elements in some clever ways, while also separating its world into manageable but interconnected chunks that usually require you solve a few puzzles and conquer a boss fight before you can move onto a new area. Speaking of which, the game has quite a few boss fights and they've been challenging so far: you need to have a firm grasp of the game's platforming and combat, most of which revolves around an omni-directional "gumgumgun" that starts with limited range but has a rapid rate of fire. Oddly enough, the rest of the game is relatively combat-lite outside of these bosses: you spend most of the time exploring by platforming and solving the aforementioned puzzles, taking in this bizarre world of wums, blussers, splenhakkers, fnakkers and other curiously-named creatures.

The game's sense of lore and writing is actually its strongest suit, which I didn't anticipate after an intro that sees your overweight "wum" getting kicked out of the "wumhouse" communal living center for dripping too much ice cream mess around the halls. The game expands its lore, its characters and its setting gradually outwards, both through environmental storytelling and through collectible "filmstrips", often created by the NPCs you've met, that provide these little bonus bits of backstory. Finding a filmstrip and taking it back to the wise The Allesweter (I swear, I'll never get used to these names) nets you all kinds of rewards, so it's worth doing for that reason alone. The game's rewards come in two flavors: a currency that can be spent at a number of vendors for consumable health items and other valuables, and boosts to the health gauge that correspond to your protagonist's happiness. Helping friendly NPCs and accomplishing big goals makes your wum happier, you see, and thus increases their maximum health.

Breaking down the game to its bare essentials, this is another Indie spacewhipper with a somewhat rudimentary look and is absent major elements of the genre, such as an auto-map to consult. On the plus side, the amount of humor and silliness injected into the game raises it above most of its peers, and it has a surprisingly effective and melodic soundtrack which alternates from goofy and light-hearted in areas with other NPCs to something more atmospheric in the dangerous parts of the world. It's a game that's surprisingly rich in content and worldbuilding, and I suspect it's fairly huge too as I'm several hours in and feel I have yet to scratch the surface (I'm basing that on how much inventory space I've yet to fill).

There's always the risk that a game reviewed this highly on Steam by such a small group of people either had some sort of niche appeal like anime boobs (hence all the visual novels on the article's lists, though I'm not giving half of them nearly enough credit), or involved some forum-based in-joke/meme that only a few were privy to and could appreciate, but so far it seems that Wuppo is a genuinely good game that managed to slip between the cracks since its release last September. I'm looking forward to seeing what else Wuppo has in store.

Rating: 4 out of 5.