Once Upon a Puppet certainly succeeds in style, but it’s lacking in the most crucial part of a game
Flatter Than Earth and Daedalic’s Once Upon a Puppet has charm. It has a charm in its idea. Charm in its character. Charm in its storytelling. But there’s no real charm in the gameplay.
We play as a duo — a puppet named Drev and a puppet master hand named Nieve. They get stuck together and need to navigate their way to find out how to appease the King, who’s been throwing stuff down off the performance stage once he’s not pleased with it. It’s a nice plot, and the idea of the two together has SOME gameplay quirks — they’re both controlled with one gamepad and a few functions are tied to separate buttons, like Drev picking things up with one button and Nieve with the other.
But it doesn’t go too far into the actual puppet aspect. It just feels like controlling 1.5 characters and not a full marionette style experience. It affects that locomotion, as we’re mostly leading the pair around, slowly because one can’t get too far away from the other. The game is a 3D action platformer that is mostly side scrolling and relies on the animation to be a big part of its locomotion. And, because of the puppetry aspect, that means that it’s not focused on the actual action, but more of the visual of the reaction.
The world is sort of set up like a diorama puppet stage play, and the developers did a really good job of capturing the visual of that, especially with aspects of wood and lighting. However the nice story and nice visuals don’t get elevated with the uninspired gameplay, which means that the end product just kind of works as a presentation rather than an enthralling experience. It’s fine, it’s a platformer, and it gets the job done, but the presentation is just that: a nice, glossy shine on otherwise pretty standard backbone.
It also has some performance issues like framerate drops and slowdown that make any gameplay issues even more visible. I played it on SteamDeck, so at least it gives some levers we can pull to adjust performance, but they don’t do enough to really fix everything.
Once Upon a Puppet feels like a passion project, as if someone really wanted to make a puppet game like this since we haven’t had one in ages. But it’s not interesting enough to be THE puppet game that they were hoping it would be. It’s missing that “special” magic that brings the puppets to life in the game’s world in the first place. It’s on the shorter side, so it can be cleared in an afternoon, and I feel like that’s just the right amount of time that this particular game can hold attention-wise.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and Video courtesy Publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest LIVE for August 07, 2025.
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