Take one look at Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo and it’s easy to see where many of its influences have come from. This is a papercraft version of the Latin American underworld – think Paper Mario by way of Guacamelee – and its emphasis on helping lost souls come to terms with traumatic events in their life (complete with big boss-style battles where kind words, not harmful attacks are your main ammunition) has glimmers of Chicory: A Colorful Tale about it.
But the main thing that struck me while playing its Steam Next Fest demo wasn’t so much how it looked, or what the main thrust of its overarching story was. It was how much like Majora’s Mask it was in the way its small cast of characters all had their fixed routines and set locations throughout different times of the day – something that perhaps isn’t as obvious just from watching the trailer.
It was quite a pleasant surprise when I discovered this, as all I’d done was sit down on a bench to fast forward through the day a little bit until evening arrived. I’d seen a cryptic stone tablet earlier on in its short stretch of demo level saying something about knocking twice on a mysterious door once twilight fell, so I wound the clock forward thinking I’d just pootle on back there to check it out. What I didn’t expect to see was the owner of the flower shop behind me also now outside and looking puzzled at a nearby gate.
Mysterious door now forgotten, I rolled my charming little skelly snake – the Kulebra of the game’s title – over towards her to see what was wrong. She wanted to retrieve a special plant from the garden so she could put it up for sale, but had unfortunately lost the key to open the (admittedly very low, definitely hop-able) gate’s very sturdy padlock. “If I had found it early today,” she said, “I would have taken care of this during the day.”
Immediately, a lightbulb went off and flashbacks to a dazed Romani at the ranch in Majora’s Mask appeared front and centre in my brain. Oh ho, it’s one of these games, I realised, and sure enough, when I sat back down on the bench to zoom through to the next day, everything started falling into place. You see, there’s a curse that afflicts the residents of limbo here, causing them to forget the previous day’s events with the rise of the sun each morning. Unless you leave a mark on their soul in some way, such as by doing them a favour or fulfilling certain requests for them, the day will loop round again as if nothing had happened – and I spent the following hour trying to untangle the game’s complex web of interlocking puzzle quests so I could move on to my next destination.
It’s all very artfully done, and the emotional climax of this particular little story really clutched hard on the old heartstrings, touching on subjects such as absent fathers, leaving the family home, and not wanting to abandon your remaining parent to go and live your life to its fullest. It’s a very confident start to what I hope will be many more sincere and earnest tales of folks coming to terms with their flaws and foibles.
There are a few things that I wish were a bit smoother, though, particularly when it comes to using important items in conversations. Opening up your inventory and manually selecting items mid-convo (using a different button to the one you’re pressing to advance the text, no less) is both a bit fussy and easy to skip over if you’re a bit impatient, prompting tedious, repeat cycles through the same dialogue sequences over and over again (though I was pleased to see you can just hold A to skip through text you’ve already seen to speed things up a bit). It’s also sometimes difficult to judge how close Kulebra’s roll is to the surrounding scenery, resulting in lots of jarring halts every time he crashes into a wall. But these are both mostly minor quibbles in the grand scheme of things.
I’m intrigued to see where Kulebra will end up next on his journey through the afterlife, so here’s hoping we’re not left in release date limbo for too long either.
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