Poto & Cabenga

Gamma is a series of events displaying various experimental games which are submitted according to a primary theme. The theme for this year’s event, Gamma IV, was one button control. Out of the one hundred and fifty submissions, six were selected and displayed last month in San Francisco, coinciding with the Game Developers Conference. One of those six, Poto & Cabenga, was recently made available online, playable in a browser.

Poto & Cabenga is a platformer with auto-movement where holding down the space bar is dash and releasing is jump. While that may seem simplistic, Poto is soon dismounted from Cabenga yet both are still controlled with a single button. Cabenga retains the same controls—hold to dash, release to jump—but Poto walks when the space bar is held and jumps when it is pressed in.

It creates these rub-your-belly-and-pat-your-head kind of situations where both Poto and Cabenga need to be coordinated because when an action is done with one character a different action is done with the other. This can be a bit hard to comprehend at first but it becomes an almost rhythmic control scheme once it is understood. A slick art style rounds it all out and gels an interesting and enjoyable game.


Ben

[Play Poto & Cabenga in a browser. For more information about Gamma and other projects by The Kokoromi Collective, visit their website.]