YOOKA-LAYLEE
Our exclusive hands-on preview of the brightest platformer coming to PlayStation.
Playtonic’s irreverent throwback is nearly finished. Chris Schilling takes an early peek at
Yooka-Laylee’s fourth world and gets an exclusive hands-on with its riotous local multiplayer mode
We’re supposed to be breaking for lunch. Playtonic’s Andy Robinson (writer, unofficial Head of Dad Jokes and voice actor for “A depressed shopping trolley”) floated the suggestion 15 minutes ago, yet we’re still playing. Having just completed a quest and earned ourselves a Pagie (Yooka-Laylee’s most important collectible), we admit “This would be a good place to stop,” and prepare to set the pad down. Then we spot a single Quill pickup we missed on the way to our present location. Ten minutes later, the controller’s still in our hands.
That, in case you were in any doubt, is a good sign. YookaLaylee’s vast worlds are stuffed with activities and pickups, but it’s even more of a treat simply to run, jump and roll around them. That’s partly down to the immaculate controls – dare we say this is the best-feeling 3D platformer that doesn’t star a certain famous plumber? – but also the kind of game design that gives you the space to make your own fun rather than leading you by the nose.
A short opening tutorial which teaches you Yooka and Laylee’s basic moves and sets up the story is as linear as the game gets. After that, you’re on your own. There’s no HUD – collectibles will flash up at the top of the screen when you pick them up and quickly disappear – and, perhaps shockingly for some, no mini-map whatsoever. “This is proper exploration,” says creative lead Gavin Price. “Our philosophy is that we’re not handholding, there won’t be any waypoints, and you can go through the game in multiple orders. We’re harking back to an era where designers had confidence that players could be trusted to find their own way.”
This isn’t merely a reaction to modern games’ tendency to coddle players; it’s a design choice
“THIS IS PROPER EXPLORATION… WE’RE NOT HANDHOLDING.”
that’s rooted in Playtonic’s past. Many of the studio’s 20 staff used to work at Rare, a name some gamers will associate with Microsoft, but others of a certain vintage (*cough*) will know best as a former partner of Nintendo. During the mid-’90s in particular, games such as Banjo-Kazooie and Conker’s Bad Fur Day were the envy of many a PlayStation owner. PS1 might have thrashed N64 in terms of sales, but Rare’s output was so consistently good that it was worth owning both consoles just to play the developer’s stuff. If those names mean nothing to you, consider Yooka-Laylee as your opportunity to catch up: it’s a game very much in keeping with the creative spirit of those Rare classics, but made with a contemporary sensibility.
CAPITAL CRIMES
Keen to rush us straight to the chorus, so to speak, Robinson rattles through the tutorial with the aid of a cheat or two from the debug menu. We know the setup already, but in case you don’t: a bat called Laylee and a chameleon called Yooka find themselves up against evil businessman Capital B and his sidekick Dr Quack, who are stealing all the world’s books in the hopes of earning a tidy profit from them. Some pages (or, rather, Pagies) have escaped, and it’s up to this courageous couple to track them down. While there are plenty of gag-laden dialogue exchanges, the plot isn’t too intrusive, though more inquisitive players will find plenty of background info if they’re in the mood to go digging for it.
Soon we’re introduced to Trowzer, a sales-snake who wants you to help expand his business by unlocking new worlds. To which end, he’ll offer you free moves that let you progress within the hub area of Hivory Towers. “He’s a bit of a Del Boy type,” says Robinson. “Like a combination of Zapp Brannigan, Lionel Hutz and Saul from Breaking Bad – he’s the kind of guy that’s so sure of himself but in reality he’s a bit of a loser. The further you progress through the game the more outlandish tales he’ll tell. He’ll say ‘Ah, I remember that world, they named a currency after me once’.”
The freebies Trowzer provides give players a steady flow of new moves in the hub for Yooka and Laylee, even if you choose not to buy anything from him. But once you’re in the game’s main worlds, you’ll need to pick up Quills to
“IT’S VERY MUCH IN KEEPING WITH THE CREATIVE SPIRIT OF THE RARE CLASSICS.”
buy upgrades. Certain challenges won’t unlock if they require a specific ability to complete, so you needn’t worry about getting stuck, and as such you can purchase moves in any order.
FLAPPY SHOPPER
“Unlike your Mario 64s or your Banjo-Kazooies or games in a similar vein, you’ll actually spend your collectibles,” Price explains. “Once you’ve spent a Pagie, that’s gone, and that helps us reinforce the choice angle.” You can, for example, choose to spend Pagies expanding the current world you’re on, or unlocking the next. Or you could return to an earlier world and buy the expansion for that. It’s hardly the kind of dilemma you’ll agonise over like in a Telltale game, but Playtonic’s aim is to give players a degree of freedom in the order they do things, rather than forcing them to complete a challenge they might not be enjoying to progress.
There’s lots of variety in the objectives, too. There are ghosts to catch, waves of enemies to bash, races to win, and tricky vertiginous climbs to conquer. Some Pagies come in cages, which means a nearby environmental puzzle needs solving before you spring the lock. One example requires us to manoeuvre a wooden platform to form a bridge between a cluster of berries and a switch on a short timer that’s activated by gobbing juice at it. Elsewhere, we find an incomplete Pagie, inviting us to hunt down the other fragments. “I thought this was a modern game,” Laylee sighs. “Collectibles are supposed to come in one piece.”
A jaunty jingle sounds when you get a Pagie, but otherwise there’s no real ceremony – you can move on immediately. But even here there’s a choice. The D-pad offers you a selection of emotes: we go in for a celebratory high-five between the odd-couple Gaudy Capital Cashino. Anyone fancy table golf with a giant golden ball? leads, but there’s also a dance and a taunt. This was, Price says, a result of feedback from the game’s Kickstarter backers, who were split on the issue: “When you get one of the main collectibles in a [platformer]
“THERE AARE GHOSTS TO CATCH, WAVES OF ENEMIES TO BASH, RACES TO WIN.”
and the character stops and does a dance, some people think that’s awesome and the other half say that it slows you down – [especially] if you’re speedrunning.” Player-controlled emotes, then, are the natural solution, letting you stop and salute the achievement or move on without any fuss. You can even act up in conversations with NPCs. “You’re free to react to what they’re saying, just for fun, or you could use it to taunt a boss, for example,” Price adds.
We’re too focused on beating the guardian of Tribalstack Tropics to think about taunting him. Rampo is a cyclopean stone golem who stands at the top of a slope breathing flames at anyone who gets within range. Reaching that stage is quite a challenge in itself, as you’ll have to leap over rolling logs on the way up. It’s the one moment where our natural instincts fail us – as long as you’ve got i held down, Yooka and Laylee will stay in a ball and you can pause before jumping, which increases the height of your leap. Holding up while jumping is a one-way trip to Painsville, and if you’re hit you’ll begin a perilous slide, losing more health if you collide with any logs on the way back down.
Thankfully, there are handy butterflies at the bottom (eat them for a health top-up, or walk into them to refill your power meter) for us to have another shot, then another, until we bash Rampo’s teeth in.
VIVA LAS PAGIES
There’s just enough time to beat up a handful of angry barrels which have been possessed by pairs of googly eyes – a sly nod to Rare’s fixation with adding cartoon peepers to everything – before we finally fill our stomachs and return for a first glimpse of the fourth world, the delightfully tacky and extravagant Capital Cashino. As we mentioned last month, this gives you a very different set of goals, with a series of games in which to earn tokens, which can be exchanged with a shady banker for Pagies.
These aren’t the kind of games you’d find in a real casino. “It took multiple Skype calls of reassurance to Team17 that there wouldn’t actually be gambling in the game,” Price laughs. Suffice to say that you’ll end up playing a bit of golf, strutting your stuff on a nightclub dancefloor, and smashing glass with a Sonicstyle spin-dash move.
If you’re having trouble with any of the challenges, you can call upon some unlikely assistance. “We’ve got a [Super Mario] Galaxy-style co-op mode,” Price tells us. “It’s a swarm of bees
called The Bee Team. They’re willing to help you because they hate Capital B for giving bees a bad name.” A second player will be able to guide the swarm via a reticule to grab Quills, store butterflies and even slow down moving platforms to make trickier jumps that bit easier. It’s designed with families in mind – allowing Playtonic to include challenges that will test even platforming veterans without alienating younger players.
It’s a suggestion that arrived relatively late in the day, and it’s one Playtonic is keen to explore further. “We thought it would be cool if you could make them form a shape, like a hammer, or even a platform, so we’ll probably elaborate on that going forwards,” Price explains. “It’s a shame we didn’t think of it early enough in development to fit it in this one as well.”
YOOK-ARRRRR!
Not that Yooka-Laylee is short of ideas – in fact, there’s one last titbit the developer is prepared to share. “We found all these cool little nooks and crannies in each world once we’d placed all the Quills and the Pagies and everything else,” Price says. “So we’ve included a super-secret collectible on every level, a bonus piece of pirate treasure, which we won’t be talking about too much.” Why the secrecy? Well, it’s what Playtonic’s audience – the people who made it the biggest crowdfunded UK videogame project ever – wants. The results of polls on its forums have told the studio that it shouldn’t give too much away, and Price admits that even the reveal of Capital Cashino will annoy some backers. “But with the game coming out [on 11 April], we really have to have new stuff to show.”
In other words, everything you see here is only half the story. Yet that’s in keeping with a game that wants players to discover its secrets for themselves. Come April, we’re confident YookaLaylee will be responsible for many more late lunches. After all, in a game as generous and absorbing as this, there’s never really a good place to stop.