The Pupu's Adventure Park logo with a purple blob with a face on it. It sits in front of a selection of other PuPu Blobs, and what looks like a carnival. It's all in a cartoon style.

PuPu’s Adventure Park Early Access Review

2. I Like it a Lot, About Games, Adventure, Genre, Indie, Rating, Review, Simulation, Steam Early Access, Steam review Leave a comment

Game: PuPu’s Adventure Park
Genre: Simulation
System: Steam (Windows only)
Developer|Publisher: 西梅树工作室 (Plum Tree Studio)
Controller Support: None
Price: UK £12.79 | US $14.99 | EU € 14,79
Release Date: July 18th, 2023

Review code provided with many thanks to Bytedance.

PuPu’s Adventure Park is a simulation game where players bring heroes into their world, battle them, and earn their sweat to refill their sacred pool. Players get to breed PiPi (which is the plural of PuPu), these adorable little slime creatures with goofy faces.

A map of the upgrade system; this system has branching items that spread out from one another, giving players more and more items to unlock.
The skill tree is amazingly massive.

The Gameplay of PuPu’s Adventure Park

PuPu’s Adventure Park is incredibly complex. There is so much to balance, so much to do, that it’s hard to keep track of everything. Players have 30 or so different items they can collect and use to upgrade their parks, their PiPi, the Adventurers coming to the park, pay their monthly rent, get new adventurers, new buildings, and a whole host of other upgrades.

An adventure park with six or seven little buildings sits around a central summoning circle where heroes spawn in.
If you don’t have enough PiPi to run all the different locations, you must choose which ones to keep running.

If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is a lot. PuPu’s Adventure Park might look like a kid’s game, but it’s so complex that I don’t think any children can handle it. It’s crammed to the brim with instructions; players must read a lot just to get the general gist of what’s happening.

First, players have rented a theme park from their Goblin overlords. They charge monthly rent based on how much land the PiPi have decided to take, and they can expand their land as they get more and more buildings.

A selection of cartoon buildings sits on what looks like a purple, cave floor. Little blob critters named PiPi blob around on the surface, eating cookies and playing.
You must keep the blob friends happy, or else they won’t be able to work.

Gameplay Video

I recorded my first hour playing this game to give everyone here an idea of how much there is to learn to do in PuPu’s Adventure Park.

Here’s a basic list of all the things I learned in the first hour of gameplay:

  • Players have to build new buildings, put a PuPu in charge of it, and then open them.
  • Players must build a road leading to each new building, clearing any trees or plants in the way.
  • Once a PuPu is exhausted from running its section of the park, players need to feed it, rest it, and replace it.
  • Players need to manage the upgrading of heroes and upgrading their quests.
  • Then, you have to upgrade the PuPu’s home in the Spring and add new buildings to make the PuPu happier and give them more room to breed.
  • Then you have to breed them.
  • Players need to convert sweat into goop to make more buildings.
A comic-book style story plays out, encouraging the PiPi to summon more heroes.
All the story is told in adorable Comic book-style panels, and I love it.

And this is just the start; there’s like 1,000 more steps. And that doesn’t include collecting items to pay rent, upgrading PiPi and feeding them the right foods to improve their moods, and a whole bunch of other little things.

PuPu’s Adventure Park is bonkers from start to finish.

They Are All So Cute!

What drew me to PuPu’s Adventure Park in the first part was the look. The simplistic and adorable doodles make this game absolutely charming. I love the little theme park aesthetic; this much cute stuff all in one spot is enough to fill up anyone with serotonin.

A menu screen holds just one of many upgrade screens, this one for the Spring of Life, the central pillar of the PuPu Home.
Here’s what I mean by the game throwing a ton of information at you all at once.

While the game is hard, you find yourself wanting to work as hard as possible to make a beautiful, happy home for all your adorable little blob friends. This, coupled with the fact that music is soothing, you can pause the game at any time to make improvements, and you can even speed it up to keep from getting bored if you’re waiting on a building, PuPu’s Adventure Park is one of the more relaxing sim games I’ve ever gotten to play.

Conclusion

PuPu’s Adventure Park is not easy. It’s not a short and sweet little sim game that you can just half pay attention to. Additionally, it’s something between the most complex idle game and one of the weirdest sim games I’ve ever played. It’s weird, it’s too complex for its own good, but it doesn’t punish players for being bad at it. You learn as you go (even if the amount of information is overwhelming sometimes), and you build up your little park, making all your little PiPi’s as happy as possible.

A black and white picture shows a variety of summoning circles.
Now It’s time to start summoning!

I adore this game, but I can see it not being for everyone. The level of complexity is over what some will find fun, but I believe that sim fans will like PuPu’s Adventure Park as much as I did.

Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot. 
I like it a lot

 
           

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