Soup Weather - Switch Review

Grief is an emotion that touches us all. It is a painful, uncomfortable feeling that everyone wishes to avoid but needs to be accepted. Soup Weather is an indie game that looks into grief and how it can make us feel but with so many other games out there covering the same subject, what does this one bring to the table? The interactivity of games can help bring deeper understanding to complex emotions, so Soup Weather needs to stand out.

The Good

In the game, we follow Bean, a 20-something unemployed man who is no stranger to grief. Despite this, he is living a content life, responding to his neighbours with smart-arse remarks. Due to its theme of grief, someone close to Bean dies and sets him on a spiral of anxiety, with unresolved emotions surfacing. The game does a good job of portraying how mental illness and, in particular, how intrusive thoughts can affect a person’s mood. As someone who suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that presents as intrusive thoughts, I found the portrayal accurate. 

Bean’s world starts bright and colourful, with Bean finding everything interesting. Over time, however, the colours dull, fog rolls into town, Bean’s walk cycle slows down, and he can no longer jump. The artistic representation of how mental health can affect how we see the world around us is cleverly done. I quickly noticed the difference and was thoroughly impressed with the effort the developer had put in to ensure the art represented how it felt to suffer from a mental health episode.

TL;DR

• The intention is good
• Artistic concepts are interesting

The Bad

Unfortunately, the positive impressions stopped there. During a dream sequence where Bean has an important conversation with the cause of his repressed grief, the game has the player controlling Bean in a Flappy Bird-esque mini-game. The obstacles are clouds, and if the player fails, they have to start again. Due to its difficulty, I stopped paying attention to the story and focused on getting past the bloody game, as I had redone it about 10 times at that point. It just felt so strange to put something so poignant over a mini game that required all my attention. I think I got the gist of it, simply because I failed so many times, but the game did it again during the section where Bean has their healing moment. I couldn’t read what was being said because I was so busy trying to prevent myself from failing the minigame and having to go through it all again. These cutscenes are long, and so a brief lapse in concentration will force the player to sit through it all again. 

Soup Weather only has four controls. Jump, open journal, interact and move and yet things like moving up stairs are needlessly cumbersome. Most 2D games would have players able to press up or down to traverse stairs, yet in this game, you need to move away from the stairs and jump onto them to go up the stairs. The game also suggested that I could somehow get onto the roofs of the houses, but I wasn’t able to get it to do that at all. Now it could be on me; maybe I wasn’t good enough, or I was doing it wrong, but the game made no indication of that. This was especially true during mini games as well. The controls for these often felt awkward and needed a lot of time to get used to. In fact, let’s talk about the mini games. 

Aside from the cloud mini-game, a lot of the other ones I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Some were easy to pick up through a bit of trial and error, but others I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing or if I was doing it correctly. This was especially prevalent with the Geese minigame, but there was another one where I had to catch falling items, but catching items meant others fell, so I had no idea if I was supposed to try and catch them or not. I spent a lot of this game having no idea what I was doing. 

Speaking of the Feed the Geese mini game, I played this mini game three times and every single time I ended up putting my Switch 2 down. I chose to troubleshoot on my computer, an activity I actively hate, rather than deal with the minigame. I had no idea if I was in control of the projectiles or the goose. The goose moved without my input, and when I tried to control it, nothing happened. All I know is B allowed me to honk. There was a metre on the side of the screen that sometimes filled and sometimes decreased, but I had no idea what it was supposed to be showing me. It felt frustrating, and like I wasn’t actually interacting with the game, so I just stopped. 

The last problem is a minor one. Bean’s house is in the middle of the stage. Annoyingly, you need to speak to everyone. This means you spend chunks of time just walking without anything happening. Maybe this is so you notice the changes in the environment, but it was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

TL;DR

• Important moments over minigames
• Controls are naff
• No explanations for minigames
• Feed the geese minigame may be broken
• Starting point placement isn’t great.

Final Score: 5/10

Soup Weather felt less like a game and more like an art installation. It wasn’t exactly fun to play, but while the message it was portraying was important, it had a lot of issues that prevented it from being engaging. I’m unsure if this is on purpose, but there were times when I seriously questioned if the game was broken or if I had encountered glitches when that wasn’t the case. The game is a short experience, thankfully, and I think it could teach people an important lesson, but it’s not an enjoyable game. When playing, I considered other unenjoyable games such as Spec Ops: The Line, but the gameplay and story kept me engaged, despite the horrible things that were happening. There is none of that in Soup Weather.

Thank you for checking out our Soup Weather Switch review, thank you to GiantMargarita for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

• Andrew Caluzzi (Inca Studios / Camped Out)
• Bel Cubitt
• Bobby Jack
• Jack Caven
• Nintendo Maniacs
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