Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair
Playtonic continues its loving reprise of the Rare back catalogue
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Credit where it’s due – the team of mostly former Rare developers at Playtonic know exactly what they’re doing. Released in 2017, the Kickstarterfunded Yooka-Laylee wasn’t so much an homage to 1998’s Banjo-Kazooie as a modernday rebadging of it, a spiritual reboot not only of a classic game, but of a whole genre, or at least the part of it that Rare absolutely cornered in the N64 era. So it is here. The elevator pitch is straightforward: if Playtonic’s colourful Banjo riff tickled your fancy, you will probably also be interested in its spin on Donkey Kong Country.
Squint a bit and, on first inspection, Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair is mechanically inseparable from Rare’s SNES platformer. There’s a similar hefty momentum to the player character – oddly, given a chameleon is no ape, even with a bat riding on its shoulders – and the same barrelling forward roll. Level design is familiar, too. You collect Quills instead of bananas, sure, but the inspiration is, to put it mildly, worn on The Impossible Lair’s sleeve.
Differences do, however, yield themselves during the two early missions that comprise our demo. Get hit and Laylee takes off, flying around in panic for a few seconds. Fail to get to her in time – no easy task given her unpredictable flight path – and she’ll be unavailable until you call her back using bells that, even early in the game, are far from generously placed. While she’s absent, you’ll be missing a few moves. Still, even solo, Yooka retains his Lizard Lash ability, an extension of his tongue that in the previous game was used to grapple across otherwise impassible gaps by latching on to fixed points. It isn’t usable in either of the levels we play, but it seems that’s a recurring theme; certain areas can’t be reached with our current moveset, suggesting a gentle gear-gating element that will see you return to completed levels later on to mine them for secrets.
The same applies to the overworld, which represents the biggest departure from the Donkey Kong Country template. Essentially an interactive world map, it’s full of light puzzles – Yooka slurps up a bomb, scurries over some platforms while the fuse burns, and fires it at a rock blocking the way to a tunnel that leads to the next area – and what happens up above can affect the levels themselves, with an environmental change in the overworld altering the layout of a stage in the same region. A water puzzle later on floods part of the world map; within it, the foliage has grown into a jungle.
It’s this element alone that stops the game being a work of outright nostalgia, at least from what we’ve seen of it so far. Yet even the overworld feels familiar, albeit to a far more recent game. Players of Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle will feel right at home with its light-touch puzzling and exploration. And if the mechanical link isn’t obvious enough, the soundtrack – the work of Rare stalwarts David Wise and Grant Kirkhope, the latter of whom also scored Kingdom Battle – rams the association home.
This is what Playtonic does: reminds you of things you liked or loved a long time ago, and invites you to relive them. That there is little here one might reasonably consider innovative is no black mark against a studio that does not set out to make anything of the sort. Yet this game nonetheless represents a bold step forward for Playtonic: without the financial safety net it enjoyed through Yooka-Laylee’s Kickstarter success, it’s under a little more pressure to deliver. And, of course, it again raises the question of what the studio will do once it’s worked its way through the Rare back catalogue. We’ll take Jet Force Gemini next, thanks.
An environmental change in the overworld alters the layout of stages in the same region