Popils

Popils, known in Europe as Popils The Blockbusting Challenge and in Japan as Magical Puzzle Popils (マジカルパズル・ポピルズ), is a stage based puzzle, platform, video game for the Sega Game Gear. It was released in the early 1990s by Tengen (see Atari) in Japan. It has the option of English or Japanese-language play.

Plot

There is a short animation during the game intro explaining a beautiful princess and a boy fall in love. But the evil wizard named Popil kidnaps her and traps her inside an enchanted forest and it is up to the boy to rescue her. When the game is completed the boy and princess are happily reunited and it's revealed Popil kidnapped the princess because he was jealous and he loves her too.

Gameplay

Popils is a single-player puzzle game in the form of a two dimensional side-view platform game. The player controls one character, a boy through different stages and must reach the princess on every stage to complete it. Gameplay centers on destroying blocks by punching them, avoiding enemies and spikes, and using various ladders and teleporting doors to reach the princess. Each stage is one fixed screen and does not scroll in any direction and is completed when the boy and princess meet, or failed when either the boy or princess is killed, the boy and princess have no health and will die upon contact with an enemy, or falling onto a spike. The puzzle aspect is based on punching the blocks, when a block is destroyed the column of blocks above it fall down one square and doing this can change the layout of the stage altering possible paths for the boy, or for the princess and enemies which move around. On many stages the player must move the boy for the most part to reach the princess, but in some stages movement of the boy is restricted to a small area and the player must make him punch certain blocks to create a path for the princess to follow to the boy.