In short : The Incredible Machine X Lemmings with a Japanese anime aesthetic. Very cute, fun, good English with an hilarious script, puzzle solutions get pretty demanding at times, sweet music and pixel-art, lots of levels to play.
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Coropata was originally a Nintendo DS game made by LukPlus and released in 2009 for Japan only, later re-released as JP DSiWare. It's now available for PCs worldwide. This is a rather unique kind of game that seemed to be an obscure hidden gem forever relegated to its initial platforms. But seeing it re-released like this is such an incredibly pleasant surprise to me.
The concept of the game is simple in its nature. You have a set of small levels with physics-based objects laid out in a scene : platforms, basket balls, rotating bridges, wooden logs, buckets, etc. The game's heroine, Himawari, is also there and acts like a Lemming, automatically moving forward and interacting with objects as soon as she gets close to them. She also has mood and energy meters that can influence her behavior, for example by making her eat a cake item or kick it depending on those meters. The objective of each level is to place a few objects you're given to complete this scene and let it play out to make Himawari go to a designated place, collect a specific item, or perform specific actions. Each stage will include a description of what is expected of you. The further you progress, the more objects are introduced, so things stay fresh and exciting. If you have played The Incredible Machine (like I did as a kid on school computers), this game loop should be pretty familiar.
While some of the stages have rather simple solutions, others can get very tricky or force you to be creative with the objects and their behaviors to complete them. Some can also be completed with unintended methods that don't use all the items, which always feels super rewarding. The difficulty when playing the stages is a bit uneven instead of gradual, sometimes the stages can be pretty easy, some others look convoluted but are also actually easy, there's some stages where the difficulty lies more in realizing the correct logic to clear it, while some seemingly easy stages with obvious solutions will require you to place objects in very specific spots to make sure the sequence of events plays as intended and you can solve the puzzle, and those last ones are where you might get stuck the most. Despite this inconsistent difficulty and getting stuck in specific stages for a while, I always want to come back for more attempts. If it was any other game I would have probably not persevered through its original version as much, but this one feels special. There's something to the lavish, colorful and cute pixel-art and the calm and relaxing music that makes it fun to try again. The interactions with object physics can also get funny with Himawari falling off platforms and being pushed around like crazy, so even failing stages can be amusing sometimes.
In between some levels you'll find story segments with funny dialogues and situations occurring with Himawari and other characters. While the DS game was left untranslated (without any completed fan-translation as of the Steam release date) but still playable without understanding of Japanese, being finally able to understand those little intermissions is a huge plus for this PC version, especially since they are very funny. The story starts off with Himawari being given plenty of excess radishes from her mom and being tasked with just handing them out to people she knows, and some bizarre hijinks occur afterwards. The quality of the English is also very good, and while I can't say myself how accurate the translation is, the dialogue itself sounds very fluid and natural, with none of the machine-translated nonsense you could see in some other games. This is also handy as the objectives are now translated so there is no need to guess what they are anymore. There are usually arrows and characters that telegraph said objectives but when you are stuck on a stage you can sometimes second guess what you thought was the objective. Besides, there's some stages where the objective description itself can give you a hint.
Stages are also very numerous, so this is a game that can last a whiiile. There's 128 stages in the "main campaign", and you have to unlock them on a linear basis, by clearing them one after the other. On top of that, you have 64 more levels that were originally distributed on the DS version through the (now discontinued) Nintendo WiFi connection. They might have been bundled on the DsiWare version too but I don't know myself. I haven't been able to play those stages beforehand so this is a welcome addition to this version. Those bonus stages are also immediately available for play deeper in the Stage Select menu so that's great!
Since this was a DS game that heavily used touch screen controls, let's talk about the way those inputs made the transition to PC. The general interface mimics the DS version's bottom screen where most of the action happened, and the text tidbits that were on the top screen are in a header at the top of the window and you can click it to get the full text. This is fine for the majority of the game, however some text also appears in that part of the interface during story cutscenes and it's cut-off early due to character limits. Since clicking advances the dialogue boxes, you can't actually open the header here to see the full extent of the text like you would for object description and level objective when playing one of the stages.
Controls-wise, the mouse is used for everything. For the most part it works well enough and I like how it's playable with a drawing pen too since it's all mouse-based, but it could definitely be better. For starters, the zoom level (which is now a gradual zoom rather than the more basic 3-levels-of-zoom from the DS version) requires you to click on a dedicated part of the interface to adjust the zoom level but there's no way to simply scroll the mouse wheel which could have been a nice feature.
Another part of the control scheme that can be improved is selecting objects. You have to click on the objects in the sidebar to select them and then click on the scene to place them, which makes sense. And when you click the object again on the scene, you can move it around before placing it again elsewhere. My actual issue with that is the circle around the placed objects that appears when one is selected. Clicking anywhere within this radius will act as if you clicked on the object, and will thus let you move it around, which is convenient at first but becomes a minor annoyance when two movable objects are close to one another and the screen is zoomed out. You can't select the second object if it's in the radius so you have to click once outside of it to deselect the first object and despawn the circle and then click on the other object. This issue wasn't a thing in the DS version because the circle wasn't there in the first place.
Some other QoL I'd like to see added is a way to use a button or mouse click to start the stage or stop it when it's being set in motion. While this was also a clickable button in the touch screen interface on the DS, a shortcut also allowed you to quickly access it by pressing a button on the console, which doesn't seem to be the case here. Overall it seems like some of the cool stuff you could do with a mouse wasn't fully taken advantage of (like wheel scroll for zoom or right click for instant object removal), but what is there still works decently so I don't have any major complaints about the transition from DS to PC.
In the end I'm very happy to see this game being re-released on PC and made available in English for the first time. It's not without its flaws but it's extremely charming and now widely accessible, that's really great. Props to LukPlus for porting this gem!
