Mar 31, 2019  Yoshi's Crafted World might be the most beautiful game on the Nintendo Switch, with each stage being a colorful treat to explore. Yoshi's Crafted World runs equally as well in both docked and tabletop mode, with almost no decrease in the quality of the graphics or the game's performance.

• If things get too tough, it’s easy to instantly change modes. Egg on a friend in 2-player co-op Jump into the game with a friend or family member to explore the Yoshi’s Crafted World game anytime, anywhere on your Nintendo Switch system.
• Apr 04, 2019  With all the talk lately about easy modes and legitimate difficulty, Yoshi’s Crafted World is a breath of fresh air. It’s just a comfy game to sit back with and enjoy. This easy mode gives.

Yoshi's Crafted World (Switch) Review

by Neal Ronaghan - March 27, 2019, 6:00 am PDT
Total comments: 1

Wrap yourself in a blanket and curl up with the cuddliest Nintendo game in a while.

Yoshi’s Crafted World plays like a comfortable warm blanket. A coziness pervades the entirety of GoodFeel’s Switch debut, following up on their similar past work of Kirby’s Epic Yarn and Yoshi’s Woolly World. It carves a slightly different path than Woolly World, though - one that I found far more enjoyable - and in the process creates a new Yoshi adventure that edges out of Yoshi’s Island’s shadow and becomes something more fresh by focusing on a gentler pace and an emphasis on discovery.

Let’s start with the very good: the visuals are spectacular, going for a distinctive look that relies on a handmade arts and crafts style. Crafted World is one of the prettier games on the system so far, blending GoodFeel’s craftwork aesthetic with the sheen of Unreal Engine. The cardboard and plush feel of the surroundings and world feel like you could reach out and touch everything. Nearly every level has a new twist or trick that adds to a sense of discovery, whether it’s the joy of Yoshi’s papercraft mech or Poochy’s playful prancing. Unfortunately the music doesn’t match the glory of the graphics; the soundtrack repeats a lot of similar variations of the same theme. The better tracks nail a music box toy feel, but nothing stands out as all that memorable or good. It’s a disappointment given GoodFeel’s generally great soundtracks for their games in the past.

The level structure and gameplay loop is a little peculiar (and also elegantly on display in the available eShop demo), with one to three levels making up a themed area. The levels feature the typical Yoshi collectibles of hidden flowers, 20 red coins, and full health. Here each level has a coin goal as well. You could more or less blaze through each level from start to finish without much interference, at least as long as you collect enough flowers to progress to the next area. Though taking Crafted World at a fervent pace seems ill-advised, especially as the variant Flip Side levels and souvenir hunts add more replayability to each level while encouraging you to stop and smell the cardboard roses. The Flip Side levels, which all fall under the conceit of playing the stage over again but in reverse and from the other side (or “Flip Side,” get it?), focus on speed, as you try to collect all three hidden Poochy Pups in a certain amount of time. On their own, I find those levels to be a little antithetical to the game’s overall pace, but combined with revisiting areas to find hidden objects for the souvenir hunts, I found replaying the beautiful levels amusing. Multiple steps are taken to make sure you have multiple avenues of collecting flowers to progress, and if the souvenir or Flip Side levels aren’t your bag, you can avoid them for the most part - or at least cherry-pick what you want to do the most of.

Unlike a lot of past Yoshi games, you don’t need to collect every object in a single run. Even better, when you do revisit stages for the hidden souvenirs, you can collect more red coins and flowers. Those extra collectibles will count towards your overall completion, even if you leave the stage when you find the object - which is an option presented whenever you find a souvenir in a level. Aside from areas being gated by collected flowers, Crafted World respects your time and focuses on delivering new environments, fun twists, and unique ideas.

The challenge, for the most part, never gets too tense. The last few levels get a tiny bit tricky, but nothing is ever all that hard. Bonus levels unlocked in the post-game are stronger tests, but in general, if you seek a terse platforming challenge, Crafted World won’t deliver. It’s a cutesy explorative platformer that rewards you for scouring every nook and cranny of this adorable tactile adventure. For the record, while I didn’t find it quite as egregious as past Yoshi’s Island games, this still has the hidden clouds that can only be found by walking over every square inch of the stage. That’s still a bad way to hide collectibles.

Adding to that cardboard glory are some of the adorable unlockables. Each area has multiple costumes you can unlock using accumulated coins. Most of them are generic, like riffs on found objects like fruit and milk containers, but some of the cuter ones are Labo references and enemy-inspired outfits. Amiibo can unlock a few extras as well, with the highlights being Yarn Yoshi and Yarn Poochy outfits that blend the style of Yoshi’s last outing with his new one. The costumes add additional health complementing their flair. Not that Crafted World is starved for an easy mode (which is also available in the toggleable Mellow Mode), but the costumes add a layer of protection if needed.

That layer of protection circles back to the feeling of being comforted by a blanket while rolling through the variety of cozy levels and cute touches. Yoshi’s Crafted World is a stable, enjoyable adventure that brings enough of a twist to the expected Yoshi adventure to make it stand apart in a way no Yoshi platformer has done in years. It has a few blemishes along the way, but just break out the duct tape and stick that cardboard back up so you can romp your way through this delightful easy-going platformer.

Summary

Pros

• Comforting
• Gorgeous visuals
• Level variety and creativity
• Lots to collect, do, and see
• Pleasantly relaxed pace

Talkback

It is a very cute an a fun game. I highly recommend it for anyone.

Game Profile

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Worldwide Releases

Even though Yoshi is one of the best things about the Mario franchise, our green dinosaur friend is often times relegated to the role of sidekick. Every once in a while, though, Yoshi gets to star in a game of his (its?) own, starting with Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island way back in the days of the SNES. Since then, a variety of games starring Yoshi have been launched for various Nintendo platforms, most recently with Yoshi’s Crafted World on the Nintendo Switch.

I’ve been fond of most of the Yoshi games released throughout the years, or at least the ones I’ve played. Yoshi’s Island, of course, is a classic, and even though Yoshi’s Story on the N64 can certainly be accused of being too easy, it was still a fun game for 11-year-old me. More recently, it seems Nintendo has been trying to separate its Yoshi titles from the rest of the Super Mario Bros series, using them as a vehicle for platforming ideas that might be a little too out there for Nintendo’s flagship franchise.

We saw this happen in both 2015’s Yoshi’s Woolly World and now Yoshi’s Crafted World. I never had the chance to play Yoshi’s Woolly World when it came out, but I have been spending a good amount of time with Yoshi’s Crafted World lately. Yoshi’s Crafted World is a game that is unsurprising in a lot of ways, as it sticks with a lot of the mechanics and conventions that have appeared in previous Yoshi titles.

You’re still throwing eggs at enemies, collecting smiling flowers, and flutter jumping your way to the end of the stages in Yoshi’s Crafted World. Nothing about the core mechanics of the Yoshi series has changed too dramatically in the jump to the Switch. The big differentiator is the arts and crafts aesthetic that makes the entire game look like the creation of a young child with imagination to spare.

The way that game uses its aesthetic is often very charming. Set pieces cut from cardboard hang from wire in the background and can often reveal hidden items when you throw an egg at them. Yoshi can wear a collection of costumes made out of different arts and crafts materials (which you acquire by spending the coins you collect as you play), and the stages are made out of simple things like boxes and paper. Yoshi’s Crafted World is a happy, almost relaxing place to be, and the game itself looks beautiful.

Lending to that pleasant, relaxing feel is the fact that the stages can again be a bit on the easy side, at least at the start. I found myself coasting through some of the game’s earlier levels with ease, though in fairness, the difficulty did begin to ramp up a little bit in the later stages. Yoshi’s Crafted World definitely isn’t what I would call a hard game, but there are certainly some parts that require precise platforming or timing and might give genre veterans at least a little bit of trouble.

Still, I’m willing to overlook that because this is clearly a game meant primarily for children, and making things too difficult right off the bat would be frustrating for a kid who may be new to platformers or video games altogether. Even for players who have been around the block a few times, there’s challenge to be found in Yoshi’s Crafted World, even if the stages themselves aren’t all that difficult to make it through.

I’m talking, of course, about the game’s many collectibles. In every stage, you’re tasked with collecting a certain amount of flowers, but you’re also given bonus flowers for collecting normal coins, red coins, and finishing the stage with full hearts. You’ll often find that you well exceed the amount of normal coins required for an extra flower, and while it can sometimes be tricky finishing a stage with full health, that’s easy enough too, especially if you’re wearing a costume, which acts similar to armor and can absorb a few hits before breaking.

Collecting all of the red coins and flowers that are hidden throughout each stage on your first go, however, is going to be a challenge, and it was a very rare occurrence for me. If you want to be a completionist about the whole thing, you’ll either be revisiting levels multiple times or you’ll be spending a lot of time on your first run through looking for secrets, whether those are destructible panels that blend into the background or hidden paths that aren’t immediately obvious.

You’ll want to collect as many flowers as you can too, because they’re used to progress through the game. You’ll need to pay a certain amount of flowers each time you try to access a new area of the world map, so you can’t just speed through the levels in Yoshi’s Crafted World without doing at least some searching. If you’re short on flowers, you can play each stage again in flip side mode, which has you running from the end of a level back to the beginning as fast as you can, finding hidden Poochy Pups as you go.

So, in a way, flip side levels are sort of like time trial collectathons, and it’s another way that Yoshi’s Crafted World offers challenge to those who want more out of the standard levels. Completing flip side levels isn’t exactly a challenging task, but finding all of the Poochy Pups as quickly as possible can be, and I thought they were a nice twist that helps the game stand out from its predecessors even more. At the very least, flip side levels are a neat idea in that they let you see the levels you’ve already completed from a different perspective, and honestly, they’re worth playing through for that reason alone.

Yoshi’s Crafted World also has a co-op mode that allows another player to control a second Yoshi à la New Super Mario Bros. I honestly haven’t spent much time playing the game in co-op, but I enjoyed the time that I did, and it helps make the often serene stages a little bit more hectic. It’d be particularly useful for siblings who would otherwise fight over the Switch, or as a way mom or dad to play along without just having to sit and watch.

Aside from the difficulty, the only real complaint I have about Yoshi’s Crafted World is the music. While previous Yoshi games – Yoshi’s Island in particular – have had very memorable music that still gets stuck in my head to this day, the music in Yoshi’s Crafted World is generally just forgettable. I understand what Nintendo was going for with the soundtrack, but it isn’t my cup of tea. I don’t think I’m alone in that camp either, as Nintendo titles are known at least in part for their catchy tunes. I definitely missed that in Yoshi’s Crafted World.

Yoshi's Crafted World Easy Mode Youtube

Wrap-Up

Yoshi’s Crafted World is a really solid platformer that looks great but maybe won’t satisfy older fans who have been playing platformers for years, at least not at first. Still, it’s a very charming game, and if you don’t care about difficulty but you fawn over good design, it’s probably worth picking up. I think a lot of the puzzles you’ll encounter are well crafted, and the way many of the game’s secrets are hidden throughout its stages is definitely very clever.

Yoshi's Crafted World Easy Mode 2

If you’re buying this game primarily for a child to play, then I think it’s a slam dunk. If I were 25 years younger, I would have been enamored with Yoshi’s Crafted World from the moment I started it up. I still kind of am enamored with Yoshi’s Crafted World, just not in the way a child who hasn’t had their sense of wonder trampled by the real world yet would be.

Yoshi's Crafted World Easy Mode 1

I don’t think Yoshi’s Crafted World quite makes it into the realm of must-haves and games of the year, but it’s nonetheless a good platformer that will definitely make you smile at least a few times while playing it. In the end, isn’t that all anyone really needs?

Yoshi's Crafted World Easy Mode Lyrics

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