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Every gamer deep down holds an unshakeable certainty that, with the right physique, constitution, and coordination—in a word, athleticism—they would become the most decorated champion in the history of their sport of choice. Or maybe that’s just me. Either way, Pup Champs gives that particular complex its time in the sun by breaking down the principles of a sports game into a slick, cheerfully designed puzzle game. A skillful followup to Railbound and inbento, I was hooked after my time with the demo.
You play as a retired coach (who is a dog) getting back in the game to turn a couple of clumsy, enthusiastic kids (also dogs) into soccer stars, at least in their school league. Each level places you on a field with a goal on one end, rendered as a traditional puzzle grid. Using a limited number of moves, the objective is always to land the ball in the net.
Simple? Only at first. Level one presents a wide-open patch of grass, and the only player on the field is a pup who can kick the ball forward two spaces. Scoring is as easy as moving and kicking. Then, orange traffic cones are set up to block the pup’s shot. Before long, more teammates are added to help navigate more obstacles, each with their own specific shot pattern. Hazards increase, as does the pups’ teamwork, with new passive abilities gained over time. In the last couple of levels, I was able to play there were even opponents added to the mix.
No two “matches” are exactly the same. Pup Champs is full of ideas and is content to move on as soon as it feels the player has a handle on their current inventory of mechanics. It lends the game an especially quick pace—a rarity for level-based puzzlers.
In this, and in the actual contents of its challenges, Pup Champs aims a bit higher than simply being a puzzle box with a sporty veneer. Sure, it unquestionably is a puzzle box, but it plays on the most thinky aspects of team sports. The calculations I made in each level felt like the same kinds of calculations I might make in a real-time match. Who has a clear shot on goal? How can I get them the ball? Where can I position myself to best head off opponents?
The heart is definitely there, though some key components of IRL sports are certainly trimmed away. Namely, chaos is removed from this take on soccer strategy wherever possible. No one tries to score the pups, for example, and the terrain is static and predictable. This is a highly abstracted version of the game, cleanly designed and cleanly presented. The challenge is in finding the right line, not in executing it.
That doesn’t mean that every mechanic is presented clearly up front. Like the game’s narrative elements, new teammates, hazards, and features are introduced nonverbally. Smart level design encourages the discovery of the team’s abilities and limitations through play. Pup Champs doesn’t offer the same head-twirling epiphanies of a good metroidbrainia, but because new mechanics are presented all the time, almost every level has some mini “aha” moment.
Where Pup Champs trips me up a little is in its linearity. It’s so committed to shaving away unpredictability that I wound up locked into whatever very specific solution each puzzle was designed around. Lots of puzzle games are linear, true, but because of the core loop of discovering new puzzle elements, I really felt the lack of ability to experiment. Many times I just wanted to mess around and see how a particular interaction worked, but was unable because I didn’t have the moves left position my teammates. Freedom to fail is a part of what makes a game like this sing, but Pup Champs is uncharacteristically draconian in that regard.
This complaint never reached the level of outright frustration, though. Levels are just too bite-sized for me to feel like I lost much by restarting whenever I went down a wrong path. I could always see the end and work backwards from there. No solution felt all that distant, and each set of levels offloads old mechanics rather than stacking them all into one unruly mess. Plus, I just generally have a hard time getting frustrated at cute puppies high fiving because they learned how to chip pass.
I’m all here for the cerebralization of sports games, even if Pup Champs itself is far closer to a traditional puzzler than a dissection of the sporty genre as a whole. But for that, it has me rooting for its cast of clumsy puppies, and it has me rooting for developer Afterburn when it releases later this month.
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