Yoku’s Island Express is part of a relatively small group of games that try to take video game pinball mechanics and merge them with other genres like RPG or action-adventure. Yoku’s Island Express is a pinball Metroidvania, where you play a beetle named Yoku who arrives on an island to take over as postmaster. The old postmaster tells you that bad stuff is going on and he’s glad to get out and dump all these issues on you, so he hands you his badge and peaces out, with directions as to how to get to the village so you can start your new job.
Yoku can walk on flat ground but it also rolls a ball around everywhere it goes, and the world is full of pinball bumpers and flippers, which are controlled via the triggers. You probably spend about 30% of the time walking and 70% pinballing in the game, which surprised me because I thought it would be purely a pinball game, but the walking turns out to be necessary because that’s how you talk to people and open chests and such. Yes, there are NPCs to chat with and get quests from, and chests to find and open, because this is a Metroidvania you traverse using pinball mechanics, not a pinball game with Metroidvania elements.
The graphics and overall tone of Yoku are bright and cheerful. The tropical island is pretty and though there is some environmental variety, including typical areas like snowy mountain peaks and dark underground ruins, it all stays at a much lighter and happier tone than something like Ori and the Blind Forest. Even though the apparent stakes in Yoku are quite high once the plot is revealed, you never get the sense that the game can have anything other than a happy ending. This is partially because Yoku cannot die. If you miss a shot in the pinball portion you might fall off a cliff and have to climb back up, or you can get thrown into thorns and lose a little bit of your currency (we’re talking 2-3 “fruits” out of the literally hundreds you can carry once you upgrade the wallet) but there are no real consequences. Even the boss fights just amount to battles of attrition where you will inevitably triumph because you can’t lose, and there’s never a time limit or boss healing mechanic or anything like that. If you just randomly press buttons during the pinball portions you will eventually do enough to advance. It’s just a question of how long it will take you.
And the answer is not very long because Yoku’s Island Express is a short, easy game. I finished it in one day, playing the first part on my treadmill in the morning and the rest during a long phone conversation with a friend that evening, while he played Hollow Knight. We didn’t set out to both play insect themed Metroidvanias, it just happened that way. In addition to the fact that Yoku can’t die, none of the pinball parts are overly challenging. They mostly involve simple tasks like collecting explosive slugs on your ball to blow up obstacles or hitting a bunch of gems to unblock a path, or hitting a spinner enough to activate a switch. None of them involve complicated trick shots and there aren’t really timed challenges that reset. You just make progress as fast or as slow as you are able and then you can move to the next area. Once an area is clear you don’t have to re-do the obstacles if you pass back through it, you just need to hit your way to the paths. There are a few minor puzzles and of course areas where you need to return after getting the right upgrade, which can be a bit tedious because the pinball traversal through already cleared areas isn’t much fun, but nothing that I’d call legitimately challenging. There is a fair amount of side content that can be done during or after the main game, though, so if you’re into that your completion time might stretch from 4-5 hours to 8-10.
There really isn’t that much more to say about Yoku’s Island Express. I feel like Yoku’s Island Express is a little overrated, often called one of the best Metroidvanias in recent years while I don’t think it can hold a candle to something like Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, but overrated is not the same as bad. It’s a short, pleasant, game whose $20 price tag is reasonable enough, especially if you catch it on a sale. The music is nice but not super memorable. The dialog is fine. The pinball is not at the level of a Zen Studios table, or a Demon’s Tilt type game, and there are no enemies other than bosses, but its fits in with the laid back vibe (though the game’s story does not fit in with that.) I wish there were some enemies to “fight” and that some of the traversal was a bit less tedious and the number of currency gates based on your fruit reserves a little less (fruit is used to unlock certain plungers that you need to get to some areas and there’s never quite enough of it, which requires going back and grinding for currency at times.) But my complaints are all relatively minor. If the idea of a peppy island pinball <etroidvania appeals to you then you’ll probably enjoy this. If that doesn’t sound fun then this game likely won’t change your mind. It’s the rare example of a game where if the description appeals to you then you’ll probably like it and if it doesn’t then you probably won’t, without many additional qualifications in either direction.
It seemed like the kind of game that I’d probably like. And I did.
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