Yoku's Island Express - Nintendo Switch

Yoku’s Island Express is a platform adventure that combines pinball mechanics with non-linear gameplay, allowing you to chart your own course through its vibrant world. This unique blend of genres is the brainchild of Villa Gorilla, a studio established by Jens Anderson and Mattias Snygg, two veterans of the AAA gaming industry. Their collective experience, which includes working on high-profile titles such as The Darkness, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and The Chronicles of Riddick series, has been instrumental in shaping the distinctive character of Yoku’s Island Express.

The game introduces you to Yoku, a tiny beetle with a big job: delivering mail across a sprawling island. But this is no ordinary island. It’s a living, breathing world filled with strange creatures, hidden treasures, and secrets waiting to be uncovered. And Yoku’s method of getting around is just as unusual. Bound to a ball, he relies on the island’s network of flippers, launchers, and bumpers to navigate its diverse landscapes.

Yoku’s Island Express is a breath of fresh air in a genre that’s felt crowded. It’s fun, adorable, and wonderfully unique while still satisfying the things you love about 2D platformers. It carries itself with a carefree charm from title screen to credits and beyond, its cheerfully mellow vibe ensuring that any moments of potential frustration just melt away. Its painterly world indulges your natural curiosity, taking you from hot springs to frozen peaks, secret bases to dripping caves.

The game’s pinball mechanics are integrated seamlessly into the gameplay. Progress is fairly straightforward above ground, but dive into a pipe or enter a building and you’ll discover intricate webs of ramps and rails, alongside single-screen mini-tables and others that form environmental puzzles of sorts, spreading up, out and across the map. You’ll hit targets to free timid little creatures, scatter spores for friendly fungi, and rescue tadpoles for a giant turtle.

Yoku’s Island Express is a deeply sweet game, but it is wonderfully eager to deliver nature at its strangest and ugliest. The world is exhilarating and beautiful, but it’s also frightening and gross. This game is great, with minimal or no negatives. With only a few small niggles to complain about, Yoku’s Island Express successfully merges pinball and platforming without ever making the former feel like a gimmick. Its beautiful presentation and fun, engaging exploration blend together to create a truly unique experience.