“It’s the perfect game for this time of year”
Yoku’s Island Express is my favorite to-do list.
You’ll be reading this in January, when Twitter is banging on about New Year’s Resolutions and Easter eggs are competing with Valentine’s plushies for shelf space. But I’m writing this in midDecember, when every surface is covered with Game of the Year notes and the local Christmas market has run out of my favorite cheese and macarons. I’ll get into why this December framing is important to Yoku’s Island Express in a moment. First, I just need to say that I understand macarons are a pain to make, but only if you’re intent on making them look nice on Instagram. Everyone else should get the option to buy the singed, mismatched, ‘which real human has time for this ageing egg whites nonsense’ macarons, which still taste fine.
Yoku’s Island Express is a game about a dung beetle postman who I fling round an island using only my pinball prowess. Said island is a tangle of chutes, bumpers, and flippers which I can use to reach different areas or solve little puzzles, all the while delivering the post.
pinball wizard
It’s perfect for this time of year because playing it means I’m plugging a gap in my 2018 release list, but via a manageable portion of gaming. Yoku’s Island Express is a tight, bright platformer which does the thing it does well, and a) isn’t incredibly emotionally draining, and b) isn’t a time vampire ( Assassin’s Creed Odyssey) or a time vampire with no end point ( Fortnite).
One last quality which makes Yoku’s Island Express a good fit for is that in real pinball you can lose. But Yoku’s devs don’t care how many tries it takes me to flip the dung beetle into the right tube. The closest they come is counting how many times I fall into a thorn bush. I can just bounce around until I land the shot.
And so, I used a party blower to startle a bat into crapping itself, I punted a ball, which turned out to be an egg, from a precarious ledge to a worried tree stump, and I delivered one of three massively overdue packages. It’s like a to-do list which I can actually complete! It’s the opposite of an email inbox!