How Yooka-Laylee Is Shaping Up To Be A Rare Platforming Treat

Yooka-Laylee might be an ode to the classic platformers of the N64, but making that connection just makes how good it looks stand out all the more. It’s quite simply gorgeous, and the design of our eponymous heroes and the other characters in the world is fantastic. Coming from a team of Rare alumni at Playtonic, they certainly have the pedigree to create a new adventuring duo – it’s part of why their Kickstarter was such a huge success – and they also have all of the knowledge and experience to take a genre in which they were giants and bring it into the modern era of gaming.

The adventure starts when Yooka and Laylee find a magic tome in their stomping grounds of Shipwreck Creek. Before they even get to explore what it can do, it’s whisked away from them by Capital B, who plans to convert all of the world’s knowledge into pure profit. Obviously, he must be stopped!

Much like Banjo-Kazooie, Yooka the chameleon and Laylee the bat both bring various abilities to the table. There’s the standard of being able to jump, roll around as a ball, slam on the ground, and so on – why change what isn’t broken? – but Yooka’s long tongue can grab things from afar, and he can camouflage the pair to be invisible, while eating fire fruit lets him spew out flames in an amusingly simplistic fashion. At the same time Laylee being a bat lets them fly for a short distance, and she also has a number of sonar abilities, such as a Sonar Bomb.

This is a ‘collect ’em up’ or ‘collectathon’ platformer that has you scampering around each open world area, scooping up the hundreds of quills around the world and hunting down magic pagies from the magical book. Described like that, it sounds like a throwback, but some of the potential grind has been streamlined. In particular, health and ability pick ups are now one and the same, but depend on how you pick them up. If Yooka snatches them out of the sky with his tongue, it’s health, but jumping in and grabbing them recharges your abilities.

Though collection focussed platformers took a lot of stick in the past, Andy Robinson, writer at Playtonic, said, “I don’t think people are tired of collecting every single thing, I think it’s when there’s a loss of focus.”

Mark Stevenson, Playtonic’s hugely experienced technical art director, added, “It’s not necessarily about collecting everything, but we’ve tried to make sure we’ve streamlined things as much as possible. So for instance, with your moves, you don’t have to collect ammo to shoot, things to fly and things to roll, we’ve minimised that.

“I worked on Donkey Kong 64, which was probably the most extreme ever. You had five different colours of banana, fairies, and this and that. Perhaps the genre was a victim of its own kind of size. We’ve had a chance to take a step back from that, because it’s been a while, reassess things and hopefully provide the right balance.”

This kind of reinvigorated approach applies to the world design as well. Previously, the kinds of missions you’d find in the world would be rather by the numbers, with a race mission, a collection mission, a boss fight, and so on. Yooka-Laylee eschews this approach, with each level featuring slightly different goals that are a bit more situational and unique, such as a picture matching puzzle, fulfilling the particular demands of each level’s five ghost writers, Donkey Kong-esque mine cart sections, or challenges that relate to new abilities bought from Trowzer – a literal one-eyed trouser snake.

Each of the worlds is a magical tome tucked away somewhere in the Shipwreck Creek hub world that has long been Yooka and Laylee’s home. Playtonic were rather coy when I asked, but with the greenery of Tribalstack Tropics, the first world they’ve shown, and snippets of an ice world in the latest footage from the game, chances are later worlds might knowingly feature lava or desert sands. But what’s new and interesting is the way that, instead of unlocking a new world, you can head back to an already unlocked one and spend some collectables to make it much, much bigger.

Suddenly, new floating islands appear in the skies around Tribalstack Tropics and there’s new paths open to you. It’s a clever way of making you want to go back, beyond the simple desire to mop up a few more collectables, and it can lead to much bigger world transformations. In a cheeky and puerile fashion, the cloud called Nimble is having a little trouble passing water, hovering high up atop a mountain. Reach him and hear his tale of woe, and there are three elemental fruits nearby that can have different effects. Spray water at him and he rains, ice and he snows, but alas, I can only imagine what hell happens if you set him alight. Whatever happens, the dried up stream that ran through the level in its smaller incarnation is filled with water when he rains, frozen when he snows, as so on.

“In subsequent worlds, expanding the world doesn’t necessarily have to mean just making it bigger,” Andy explained. “We have a few more clever ideas of how that will effect the world, as you get deeper into the game, but it is pretty much like two worlds in one, in some cases.”

One thing that’s really been important for Playtonic is to make sure that each character feels like they could be the lead in their own game, and I can see where they’re coming from. There’s a slightly odd mishmash of characters beyond the two stars of the show, whether it’s Dr. Puzz, who’s half human, half octopus after a bit of a scientific accident, Nimble the cloud, Trowzer the snake or Rextro, a polygonal dinosaur who’s in charge of the various arcade machine mini-games in the game and a nod to classic N64 era graphics.

Maybe they will actually star in their own games. Mark said, “Back at Rare we took on lots of different genres and different types of games, so I’d like to think that we can do the same at Playtonic and not get stuck in ‘sequelitis’. The plus side of this being that characters we do make for these games will travel from one game to another as well.”

Sometimes taking a break and a step back lets you get some fresh perspective and insight, and that’s certainly the case for Yooka-Laylee. The genre’s nowhere near as prominent as it once was, but so many people have fond memories of classic platformers, and with so many years of experience in the team, Playtonic are creating something that’s both an homage and a step toward the future.