The first time I sat down to play Pogui, I had originally intended to have a quick 20-minute blast on the game, but I actually ended up playing it for two hours straight, which I think speaks volumes about the quality of the game.
As is immediately obvious from glancing at screenshots or video of Pogui, it’s a fairly simple, colorful platform game, featuring an appealing and cute protagonist in the form of the titular canine Pogui.
But in Pogui’s case “simple” isn’t intended as a pejorative term, as, in fact, it’s the simplicity of Pogui’s gameplay that makes it so enjoyable to play. Pogui offers 2D platform gaming boiled down to its core elements. Unlike most platform games, there are no enemies to be bounced on or shot at, just hazards to be navigated as you guide Pogui to each end of level goal, which is the simple pleasure of sleeping in his bed (and who wouldn’t enjoy that? Especially after all that running and leaping around!)
In Pogui, your aim is to reach that goal by doing nothing more than running and jumping. It’s a simple but effective game that reduces the platform genre to nothing but its core elements, which creates a pure and elegant platform gaming experience that utilizes its simplicity as a strength.
So, we’ve established that Pogui is a rather simple game, but don’t assume that this means that Pogui is an easy game! Some of the (fiendishly designed) hazards facing Pogui can be rather tricky to navigate, and while there are three different difficulty settings to choose from, none of these simplify the difficulty of said hazards, which often require a combination of running and pixel-perfect jumping and millisecond-perfect timing, as well as rather inventive uses of toy airplanes or birds. However, one of my few minor issues with Pogui is that it can be a bit too easy to die, for example, by accidentally bumping your head on a platform. I suppose in a way this is a more realistic consequence than that which you’d face in most platform games, but it can be frustrating when a very slight slip results in your demise.
Pogui may be a new game, but it certainly has a distinctly retro look and feel, with its simple but colorful cutesy graphics combined with its simple gameplay evoking the feel of the kind of platform games you’d have found on the Commodore Amiga home computer, which is further underlined by the floppy disk icon that appears when the game is saving. Or one could also imagine that a version Pogui could very well have worked well on the NES, albeit with lower resolution graphics, so it’s certainly a simpler platform game than you would have found on the flashier 16-bit consoles, but it’s still a thoroughly enjoyable platform gaming experience.
I can’t imagine that you’d feel compelled to return to Pogui once you’ve finished it, but it’s not really that sort of game, instead, It’s he sort of game where the fun comes from working out how to navigate through each hazard, then carefully doing so, (and possibly dying a few times while you try, and if you’re anything like me, turning the air bluer with and bluer with every failed attempt, which is something of a jarring contrast with the supremely family-friendly, non-violent, cutesy nature of the game!
If you’re a fan of old-school 2D platformers, as we are, you’ll enjoy every minute you pend working your way through the colorful world of Pogui, making it a very easy game to recommend, especially at its wallet-friendly budget price, and even without the replayability factor, you’ll certainly get your money’s worth!
Pogui has been developed by Eastasiasoft and Pufferfish Digital, and it was published by Eastasiasoft on February 25th 2026. Pogui is available now on Xbox One & Xbox Series X|S (version reviewed); Nintendo Switch; PC; and PlayStation 4/5, and if you love your retro-style 2D platform games as much as we do, there’s absolutely no excuse not to pick up Pogui right now!
Eastasiasoft is on a roll with its high-quality retro-inspired indie games at the moment. Following up the brilliant Hextreme Void, which we previously reviewed, with the equally brilliant Pogui!
