REVIEW: Popucom's a brilliant bubble blasting co-op bash

After playing Popucom at PAX West last year, we felt like we had stumbled upon a hidden gem; a co-op masterwork that felt like it had come out of nowhere with big charm and some genuinely powerful cooperative gameplay systems.

Now, after finishing its campaign and playing a bunch of its party mode, we can confirm: Popucom is a bubble popping dream whose bright colors and Nintendo-like polish make it one of the best co-op experiences of 2025.

​Just the Facts

Developer: Hypergryph

Publisher: Gryph Frontier

​Platform(s): PC*, PS5 *denotes platform reviewed on

​Price: $19.99

Release Date: June 1, 2025

Review key provided by publisher via ONE PR.

Despite its "hidden to us" feeling, Popucom has quite a team backing it up. From Chinese development studio Hypergryph, behind the wildly popular free-to-play Arknights series, Popucom has both some big development pedigree behind it and some decent money, as the studio's seen success through what many see as a healthier approach to the polarizing gacha system that many mobile games employ. All that adds up to a project that looks and feels finely polished and, frankly, leaves you wondering where it came from and why the whole world isn't playing it already.

In Popucom, you and a friend take on the role of two unnamed heroes who wake up on a spaceship called Pancake, captained by a round robot pal named Yolkie, and are immediately tossed into a conflict with a horrifying beast that's taken over the moon. This slimy, inky guy has been spitting a constant stream of Pomus — blobby little colored orb creatures — down onto your planet to corrupt, pollute, and generally wreck shop.

Your plan? Build a missile and blow it to bits. But you'll need more of these little eggy robots to do it, so you head out into the world to destroy Pomus and save your captive robot pals.

It's a simple setup that gets you into the action fast, not bothering to bog you down with much exposition.

But what really sells it is how charming it all is. Lots of people have called it a Splatoon-like, if for no other reason than the character design of your customizable heroes, but I'd almost point more at something like Astro Bot as a comparison point. Light narrative appeal, but it's all presented with such whimsy, such joy, that even when its heroes and villains are paper thin, you can't help but be invested in the journey.

Popucom's cutesy bubblegum pop aesthetic and modular blob design of its creatures does a lot of heavy lifting. Watching the Pomus hop around with the least-menacing grimace on their faces, seeing the robots you saved tinkering on the slowly evolving rocket ship back at the game's hub base, and watching as your androgynous characters drop cool poses on any level's victory screen never failed to make us smile.

But like Astro Bot, charm is nothing without some genuinely inventive and fun gameplay design. And Popucom matches its adorable PlayStation cousin beautifully in that department too.

A co-op masterwork . . . with big charm and some genuinely powerful cooperative gameplay systems.

Popucom's approach to co-op is always evolving and genuinely requires both of its players to lock in on the adventure ahead. This isn't the kind of game that you can skate by with one person taking the lead on all of the action. This is a true co-op experience through and through.

Where something like Split Fiction, a game we recently streamed together, can sometimes feel like a rollercoaster ride that only occasionally calls on both players to lock in, Popucom requires constant and genuine cooperation all the way through.

The core action of Popucom is bubble popping and color shifting. Enemies, obstacles, and puzzle systems all have one of four colors assigned, and each player is responsible for two colors that impact which colors you shoot, which platforms you can safely jump on, and which puzzle elements you engage with.

By using your bubble shooter, you'll shoot a ball of your appointed color at enemies and obstacles, defeating them when you get three of the same color in a row. It's like taking Bust-a-Move or Bubble Bobble into a big 3D adventure game. Now, that alone would have been fun enough for us, but then the game offers up four unique tools that play within the color shifting systems — like a shield that can deflect specific colored laser beams and blasts, which you can also lift overhead to become a platform that carries your teammate over a sea of colored goop that'd otherwise kill them.

Each tool comes with its own rule set and design elements, and Hypergryph paces out the learning perfectly, offering levels that are dedicated to one tool at a time to start before layering them on in complex specificity by the end. By the end of our 15 hours with the game, we were swapping tools and colors on the fly in a beautiful coordinated chaos.

Fighting these blob-constructed creatures is always a blast, because as you shoot new colors into it, their blob limbs grow in length and they dynamically adjust to the changes in their physiology as their blobs are both removed and added. Shoot too many off-colored blobs into their leg and they're hopping on one long leg. Finally blast off both of its legs by matching colors and you have it crawling around for dear life. It's a fun evolution of the bubble popping game formula that has some incredible tech behind it to make it work.

You can play Popucom's story mode in either local split-screen co-op or online with a pal. There are no matchmaking options in the current iteration of the game, something the team is aware of and considering addressing with a future patch, but the level of coordination you need for the game's later puzzles kind of require you to play with a good friend.

Don't let the game's cutesy looks fool you — Popucom packs surprising difficulty. Several of the boss fights require some wild reflexes to pull off the tool swapping and precise aiming needed to destroy the mass of bubbles in front of you, to the point that half of the bosses are incredibly designed rollercoaster rides that truly challenge you in satisfying ways and the other half are bafflingly difficult or require a great deal of patience.

There are some assist options that help players avoid death, but the real trouble is figuring out the logic of some of these puzzles. With the toolset provided, your instinct ends up being to think big when the solution is a little more obvious more often than not. All that to say, Julie and I did sit with some puzzles for upwards of 10 minutes, baffled as to what to do next before screaming "OH DUH" and moving on. The key here, though? It was almost always our fault, and we always appreciated the ideas, even if it took us a bit to get there. There are some genuinely clever puzzle ideas in here.

Outside of the level-based story mode, there is so much to play for here. Gathering collectibles in each level unlocks new costume pieces for character customization and several minigames that can be played in the Pancake hub world. These minigames are full-fledged and play on a lot of the same color-matching gimmicks of the main game.

There's a 2D shoot-em-up that sees both players color shifting to blast through waves of incoming Pomus. There's a silly physics volleyball game that would have felt right at home in the indie classic Sportsfriends, where players select a team of two unique hitters (some stretch their arms out forward, some upward) and make them jump and dive with only one button per hitter. There's a kind of competitive Reversi-like game where both players try to take control of a grid by making matches of three of their color. And lastly, a cooperative bubble popping game where players circle a planet and gather up incoming Pomus in their orbit, keeping the planet safe while making matches of three or more in their own radius.

Each one is deeper than you'd expect, with new levels and gimmicks unlocked the deeper you go in the main story, and serves as the perfect distraction between complicated levels. We made time for each game as soon as we unlocked something new and even made sure to play some of the others just for fun along the way.

Then there's the Party Mode, a four-player multiplayer mode that offers up unique puzzle challenges that expand out your thinking across four unique players rather than the game's usual design for just two. These sort of play out like the kinds of challenges found in something like Pico Park, in that the actual challenge is easy to see and understand; it's the execution across four different people bickering as they coordinate that makes them difficult.

All of this makes Popucom a fairly diverse co-op experience. There's always something slightly different to do to break up your sessions in refreshing ways. Party Mode is a little basic at times, and it's disappointing that there are no combat scenarios for four players — we thought that could be pretty fun — but all these offerings make Popucom a rounded experience for pals to hop into. Especially at its $20 price point.

Popucom is an absolute delight and one of the best co-op games we've played in years. It stands atop the mountain alongside experiences like Split Fiction and Portal 2. With equally enjoyable battles and puzzles, an incredible aesthetic design, and an affordable price point, Hypergryph has delivered one of the surprise hits of the year.

Video Games Are Good and Popucom is . . . GREAT. (9.5/10)

+ genuinely clever puzzle design and bubble popping gameplay with fun eureka moments, a fully mutually interactive two-player co-op experience, finely polished aesthetic and quality

- can be pretty difficult in both combat and puzzles, some of the Party Mode offerings are lighter than expected, no matchmaking or friend pass means you're best off playing locally

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