Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?! is the latest game in Daylight Studios’ Holy Potatoes management game franchise, with previous games sticking its anthropomorphic, pun-slinging spuds in a weapon shop, space, and hell itself. This time around, they’re managing a spy organization that ends up coming into conflict with an evil counterpart. I should probably mention that I haven’t played any of the previous Holy Potatoes games (not for any particular reason; there are just so many games that something’s always falling through the cracks), but I did read a bunch of reviews for those titles to get a general idea of their strengths and shortcomings, and the prevailing opinion seems to be that those earlier games had too many menus or were otherwise too slow while being on the easier side thanks to an absence of time limits. I also noticed how charmed a lot of people were by the series’ overall lightheartedness and plentiful outside references, which I can definitively state remains intact in Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?!. Not only that, but there’s a real sense of challenge here because you’re always on the clock, balancing resources, agents, and time to get as much done as possible before you have no choice but to push forward. Menus have likewise been dialed back, with everything being easily accessible. I’m not quite comfortable calling this the best Holy Potatoes game to date since I lack the firsthand knowledge to justify such a claim, but I will say that Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?! is genuinely enjoyable and addictive in the best of ways.

Wordplay… everywhere…

I’ve been pretty hard on games that rely on outside references over the years, slamming Crossing Souls and Doom & Destiny for the laziness of their references, and I stand by those criticisms 100%. Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?!, on the other hand, incorporates its numerous references into the gameplay without allowing them to impinge on or otherwise overshadow the actual story, with the constant stream of clever puns and general sense of lightheartedness smoothing everything out. The biggest reason all of these references work is that they appear to be written by someone intimately familiar with the source material, allowing them to poke at familiar elements from movies/games/comics without forcing the dialogue to hamfistedly hammer the point home. There’s a crucial difference between having a Harry Hart (from the Kingsman movies) analog confuse your pet with a butterfly and being like, “hey, remember that the Nintendo Entertainment System was a thing?” The latter is surface-deep and ultimately cheap, while the former makes the extra effort to meaningfully engage the reference. Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?! is almost uniformly devoted to the former, fortunately.

As far as I can tell, each of the Holy Potatoes games are standalone stories that share nothing other than their potato characters and penchant for unapologetic puns. Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?! follows siblings Ren and Rexa as they grow a spy agency and learn the truth behind the explosion that left them without their parents. You might read that sentence and have trouble reconciling the game’s lightheartedness with ostensibly orphaned potato children, but none of this is as dark as it appears in writing; the jokes keep the early bits from being too much, while the later story turns into a struggle against an evil spy ring called E.A. (no, seriously—the logo is even similar) that turns its agents into mindless automatons with a mind-controlling drink called Spyware. I love it.

The only downside story-wise is that things end with one of the villains still not brought to justice. I played on the normal difficulty setting and finished most sidequests (all of them, in fact, until I had no choice but to fail one because of its ultra-specific requirements, after which I pushed forward to the end while ignoring the side content), so it’s hard to say if that’s one of several endings or merely sequel bait, but it’s always unfulfilling to reach the credits knowing that you still have unfinished business.

The gameplay is where Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?! really shines

There are so many gameplay systems here that I honestly don’t even know where to begin. I suppose missions are a natural start, with you beginning by recruiting agents who come with randomized stats (Fight, Intelligence, Stealth, and Charm) and sending them off on missions that they’re suited to. Missions typically have between 2-4 possible routes that each have different obstacles like security guards, passersby, cameras, and doors, and these obstacles tend to have a weakness or immunity to actions that rely on certain stats, so sending a combat-oriented agent on a mission that requires being stealthy and picking doors is never a good idea. Agents usually only excel at 1-3 stats, however, so you have to think about who you send along for the mission and try to find the best overall fit. Information about each route’s hazards can only be unlocked by spending money, too, so you’re balancing your need for information with your bank account. That’s not even getting into the underlying management gameplay, either, which sees you placing buildings on the map that either allow you to create items (which provide bonuses during missions), train agents to increase their stats, or give bonuses to nearby buildings. Every building can only function if agents can reach it by road, obviously, so you’re constantly trying to expand in a sensible way without bankrupting yourself. And of course, agents who are occupied creating/upgrading items or bettering themselves in training areas can’t be sent on missions without interrupting their work.

That’s still a simplification of the mechanics, too. Agents have to recover after missions, which eats into time they could be training to better their stats (the level-ups they obtain after missions increases their stats, but nowhere near as much), but some missions have level requirements that can lock out level 1 agents who have done nothing but train. You’re also constantly on a time limit, with main story quests automatically appearing with a timer. If you fail to start them by the time they expire, you get a game over. The time limits aren’t too restrictive, of course, but things can definitely get stressful when you have a sidequest that’s also at risk of expiring and you’re trying to figure out an efficient way of completing both in time.

These mechanics aren’t anywhere near as overwhelming as they seem, and that comes down to Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?!‘s tendency to slowly roll out new mechanics once you’ve had time to acclimate to the basics. For example, you’re not asked to manage the moods or activity preferences of your agents until you’ve familiarized yourself with the general gameplay loop over a couple hours. That does suggest that there’s not a ton of replay value to be found here, but the 10-12 hours I got out of Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?! was still absolutely worthwhile.

Mind the difficulty spikes

As addictive as Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?!‘s gameplay ends up being, there are a few minor things that you should still be aware of. For one thing, there’s a pretty significant difficulty spike that occurs around 1/4th of the way in when the game takes your training wheels off and failing missions suddenly becomes much more likely. That boils down to the stats of your agents not really mattering early on, meaning you can hit this difficulty spike with several lacking agents who have to be quickly replaced. There’s also a recurring “story” mission type that involves Ren going solo and fighting a bunch of guards, and this plays out through round-based combat (kind of like how combat worked in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic). These missions allow you to supplement Ren’s untenable base stats by adding the best stats from four of your agents to his, but trying to build characters who specialize at everything means that he’ll enter these sequences only slightly stronger than enemies. Since these enemies take a decent chunk of his health out every hit and you have to switch between your four attacks to find their weakness, it becomes easy to lose all of his health well before you’ve reached the end.

The solution I found was to keep 2-4 agents constantly hooked up to stat-boosting machines focusing on one stat to the exclusion of all else while using 2-3 other units for actual missions (this becomes much easier to pull off once you can splice your existing agents into powerful new ones). That way, you can add those ungodly stats to Ren’s and power through even the strongest of opponents. Speaking of missions, I have one last complaint centering around mission requirements toward the end; you can create agents of different classes by splicing them together, but my classes were a mess of weird mixtures by the time a sidequest came around that required one of four very specific classes. The only way to get an agent of the correct type would be to recruit a bunch of new agents and then splice them together, and then once more with the resulting agents, but that would have taken about 3-4 times longer than the sidequest’s time limit allowed. This was also the second mission of this particular sidequest—many are broken up into 2-4 different missions—so I had already saved and had no choice but to let it expire. You can work around specific agent requirements for the most part since different routes have different requirements, but failing a mission (which gives it a permanent red X and no chance to redo) that I had no time to prepare for was disappointing.

It looks and sounds nice, though

Visually, Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?! uses a bright, cheery art style with big buttons and lots of colors that make it easy to see all of the information you’re being fed at any given point. Menus look big and mobile-inspired at a glance, but that just ends up making them easier to parse, and they avoid looking cheap like so many other games that attempt this style. All of the potato characters are incredibly adorable and have numerous over-the-top reaction portraits that help dialogue to feel more dynamic. Really, the only downside to the visuals is that the spy agency map that you spend most of the game looking at can get incredibly busy toward the end, with numerous agents, icons, and tightly-packed buildings making it difficult to remember which buildings create which device (and click on the right building even when you do remember). Musically, though, I don’t have anything negative to say whatsoever; the spy music here is on point, with the classic marimba and trumpet stuff selling the vibe and being infectiously catchy.

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 3/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 2/2 ★★★★★★★★☆☆ – 8/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for the purpose of this Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?! review

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