Hirogami review – paper folding platformer

An origami themed indie game tries to blend the best elements of Paper Mario and Tearaway into a very unique looking new action adventure.

Paper craft has been a surprisingly widespread inspiration for game developers, with more examples springing to mind the longer you think about it. The wonderful Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is probably the best example, especially given the recent remake, with perspective-shifting folding game Paper Trail not far behind it, while PS Vita title Tearaway dates back more than a decade.

One of the things that unites them all is their sense of invention, using the 2D medium of paper – and the fact that you can bend, reshape, and fold it – for all manner of clever gameplay mechanics that wouldn’t be possible in a regular 3D world. This often provides moments where you have to sit back and figure out what else you can do with that missing dimension.

Hirogami is the latest entry in the paper folding tradition and draws its influence from the Japanese art of origami. It’s a 3D platform game whose hero, Hiro, is a neatly folded chap in a natty paper cape, while the world he explores looks as though it’s been fashioned almost entirely from folded paper, before being stop motion animated. This gives environments a lovely and quite unusual look, which carries over to the way everything moves.

Hiro has a problem. A digital Blight is infecting his village, manifesting as clumps of pink translucent cubes that sprout up all over the place, and while it doesn’t appear to be doing any real harm, it does contrast with the otherwise handmade papery milieux. Fortunately, you can dismiss it with Hiro’s fan, which instantly scatters the cubes, turning them to paper that you can then collect.

Along with the Blight there are Glitchers – shiny black balls you need to defeat using a couple of quick slaps from your fan. You soon gain the ability to transform into origami animals, each of which has its own small set of skills you can use both to continue your exploration and in combat against the Glitchers.

The armadillo can roll into enemies and destroy boxes that sometimes block your path; the frog jumps much higher than Hiro and can spit poison that disrupts Glitchers’ force fields; and the gorilla can swing from and climb up ropes, as well as smashing a different type of box. There are occasional levels you fly through as a paper plane, but unlike the animals you can’t simply refold yourself into that shape at will.

Your final form is a flat piece of paper. That’s useful for squeezing under obstacles and also lets you glide short distances. Even better, it can catch updrafts that let it climb into the air to access platforms too high even for the origami frog to reach. You’ll frequently need to use a combination of forms to explore, for instance jumping up as a frog, then switching to the sheet of paper to glide to the next platform.

You’ll unlock all the game’s animal forms in the first hour or so, along with discovering the mildly satisfying process of stringing together different shapes to reach goals that involve finding scrolls, which you use to build bridges and other structures, making a path to a final shrine that purges the Blight from each level.

You can unlock more abilities for Hiro and each animal, but none of them proves especially distinctive, and all are used ploddingly obvious, predetermined ways. Boxes that need to be broken mean transforming into the armadillo or gorilla. High jumps demand the frog, while updrafts work with the flat piece of paper. You’ll often need to switch between them, but there’s depressingly little creativity in the way they’re applied.

Combat is another disappointment. Hitting Glitchers with your fan, or more usually turning into the armadillo and rolling into them, is occasionally interrupted by enemies with a shield, which you take out using the frog, or Hiro’s long range fanning move. It’s a dull process, and one that doesn’t evolve over the course of the game, to the point that removing combat entirely would subtract almost nothing from the quality or level of interest inherent in the game.

Those issues pale into insignificance next to Hirogami’s camera problems. Since Super Mario 64, developers have understood the difficulty of moving a character around a 3D plane represented on a 2D TV screen and go out of their way to assuage them with sympathetic camera angles. Hirogami does the opposite, using an awkward fixed camera view that makes it impossible to read perspective, judge jumps or avoid attacks. For a 3D platform game that’s fatal.

In early levels it’s not all that bad, only causing the odd unintentional death or injury, and the occasional moment where you have to shrug and take a leap of faith because you can’t see where Hiro’s going. Later on, it becomes increasingly infuriating, peaking when you discover that near the end of the game you’re unable to continue until you’ve collected enough golden cranes.

These are awarded for hitting each level’s goals, which include taking as little damage as possible, completing them within a certain time limit, and collecting a specific amount of paper from destroyed Glitchers. The capricious camera angles and lifeless combat make it unnecessarily tricky not to take damage, and don’t even get us started on trying to speed run levels that are exasperating enough when you’re taking your time.

Despite looking fascinatingly different, Hirogami is a graveyard of good ideas, none of which are exploited fully enough to make them interesting. On its own, that would make it mildly tedious, but the needlessly unhelpful camera angles make this a game you would cheerfully defenestrate if you had a physical edition handy.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed) and PC
Price: £24.49
Publisher: Kakehashi Games
Developer: Bandai Namco Studios Singapore
Release Date: 3rd September 2025
Age Rating: 3

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