• Yoshi's Crafted World Little Big Planet Game
• Yoshi's Crafted World Little Big Planet 2
• Yoshi's Crafted World Little Big Planet 4

Yoshi’s Crafted World Preview

For Yoshi's Crafted World on the Nintendo Switch, a GameFAQs message board topic titled 'Little Yoshi's Big Planet'.

Yoshi’s Crafted Worldcontinues the trend of platformers that use a “real world” aesthetic ofcrafting materials making up the world in which the characters travel through(see Yoshi’s Wooly World, Paper Mario, Little Big Planet, Unravel,etc.). Most of these games have the “cuteness factor” working very much intheir favor, but Crafted World maytrump them all in that area, if not in platforming difficulty.

There’s a demo currently available for the upcoming Switchgame which gives a nice, but short, preview of what’s in store for us. The demotakes you through a world filled with cardboard cut-outs, milk cartonbuildings, and a train built from a bunch of random stuff. As my wife put it,“It’s like a kid’s craft project come to life.” Indeed, the surroundingscombined with Yoshi’s yarn like, wooly exterior makes the whole experience feellike playing with a scrapbooker’s tool box to make a game. Pair those visualswith cute, sweet sounds and a pleasant, happy score, and you definitely havethe front-runner for this year’s most adorable game. But how does it play?

Honestly, hard to tell from this demo. The platforming ispretty straight-forward and simple in the one level you get to play here.However, it never gets old to swallow enemies and poop them out as eggs, whichYoshi can then use to shoot at various items to find secrets and hidden coins.The challenge of this level wasn’t so much in the platforming or defeating theenemies, but in finding all the collectibles. There are coins to collect,daisies (the friendliest flower) in your first run through, then you get theoption to go back and find the hidden poochies (no, not the dog from theSimpsons that almost ruined Itchy and Scratchy), but Yoshi’s new pet (which isweird, because I thought Yoshi was Mario’s pet). This task is interestingbecause now the level flips around and you get to see it from the reverse side.It’s really fun to see how all the crafted items were put together, and itgives the level a different feel. Finding the poochies isn’t too hard, but youare being timed, so that adds a nice sense of urgency to the level. After this,you then get the task of finding five cows and shooting them with eggs. Afterall of these collecting tasks are complete, that’s the end of the demo. So,yeah, not much here, but enough to give you a taste.

All in all, there’s nothing terribly difficult about any ofthis. I’m not sure the cute aesthetics will be enough to carry the game if it’sall this easy. Gameplay videos make it look like there may be some tougherchallenges to come in the full game. Don’t hear me wrong, I don’t want somebrutally impossible platformer here, but it’d be nice if the game isn’t just astroll in the park like the demo level. The promise of tougher levels, co-op play,and plenty of collectibles to find make Yoshi’sCrafted World one to keep an eye on this Spring; it releases March 29.

Yoshi has always had a creative bent to his adventures. As far back as 1995’s Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, Nintendo has utilized the diminutive dino’s games as a place to experiment. Yoshi’s Island has scratchy, hand drawn visuals. Yoshi’s Story looks like a pop-up book. Yoshi’s Woolly World was made to appear as though everything was built from yarn. With Yoshi’s Crafted World, developer Good Feel has introduced a new style in the form of environments that are constructed from wood, cardboard, and paper (among other things).

It’s an astounding aesthetic that manages to outshine PlayStation’s Little Big Planet games, which set the standard for hodgepodge, arts and crafts-themed worlds. The synthesis of a child’s diorama with the familiar trappings of warp pipes, coins, and Shy Guys is a winning combination. Yoshi’s Crafted World is a visual feast that is wildly detailed and inventive. Whole chunks of the game world can be smacked with the toss of an egg, while familiar faces and locales are recreated with the aforementioned piecemeal materials. One particularly impressive moment early on features an enormous, motorized Yoshi with giant boxing gloves!

Pumping at the heart of the whole experience is the series’ largely traditional egg-throwing mechanic, but for Yoshi’s Crafted World, there’s a twist. Besides being able to throw eggs any direction to the left, right, and above, players can now also lob the projectiles towards the foreground and background. It’s a small but very fun tweak that adds a new layer to world exploration. Yoshi is also able to move into and out of the screen in a manner slightly reminiscent of the PSOne-era Crash Bandicoot trilogy. This makes it much trickier to uncover every secret and path that a given stage has to offer.

Players will have to find all of those hidden goodies if they want to get a perfect score within each level. There are red coins and flowers to discover, as ever, along with new blue coins, too. Perhaps most interesting is that every stage can be played in reverse. When this happens, the entire layout is flipped and suddenly players can see the seams and tape and strings and everything else that’s holding these makeshift worlds together. It’s a brilliant touch that makes it rewarding to re-explore and locate all three tucked away Poochy Pups in this transformed perspective.

Perhaps most surprising is that the traditional nursery rhyme-infused tones are largely absent or softened in Yoshi’s Crafted World. The score here doesn’t reach the dizzying heights of Yoshi’s Island, but the set of tunes here really does a wonderful job of complementing the on-screen action. At the same time, with such a bold visual style, it does seem somewhat strange to not have a bubblier, energetic soundtrack to go with it. Considering how blasé recent Yoshi scores have been, though, this is a definite improvement.

Yoshi's Crafted World Little Big Planet Game

While the design work in Yoshi’s Crafted World is undeniably lush and vibrant, there is something about its scope that Switch seems to struggle with. It’s hard to put a finger on whether it’s the textures, the lighting, or maybe a mixture of the two, but it isn’t always one hundred percent clear what materials are being used at a given juncture. It’s hard to distinguish paper from other surfaces sometimes, for instance. There are also a handful of substances that stand out because they’re so much more realistic than everything else around them, with the shining metal coins and the gelatinous Gargantua Blarggs being a couple of the more prominent examples. It’s nothing horrendous, but slightly distracting nonetheless.

Yoshi's Crafted World Little Big Planet 2

Honestly, that’s some legitimate nitpicking considering how fabulous everything looks as a whole. Part of the thrill of this game is simply staring slack-jawed at the ingenuity on display. Yoshi’s Crafted World seemed to have somewhere new to take me every time I booted it up to play. I crossed oceans, rode trains, and a thousand things in between and loved it all. There’s an argument to be made that the Yoshi series has sort of plateaued when it comes to these types of homemade, practical-style visuals, but I’m not one of the people making it. If Nintendo designated this as Yoshi’s permanent aesthetic moving forward, it would take a long time before it started to wear thin.

Difficulty level is bound to come up when talking about Yoshi’s Crafted World and not everyone is going to be happy with it. Kotaku put out an article not too long ago talking about difficulty in video games and treated it as a matter of accessibility. With titles like From Software’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Kotaku writer Joshua Rivera asserted that “an easy mode has never ruined a game” and that devs do gamers a disservice by setting the bar too high for the average player to ever reach. I’m all for inclusion and accessibility, but I likened saying a game should be required to have an easy mode to someone going back in time and telling novelist James Joyce that he needs to write an easier to understand version of Finnegans Wake.

In short, a game is a work of art and difficulty level is as much a part of that art as the graphics or the controls. Games like Sekiro aren’t required to dumb down their challenge so that more people can “get it” any more than the creations of an abstract painter or writer are. I mention all this because the opposite complaint is frequently levied at games like Yoshi’s Crafted World, where the challenge is toned down and thus deemed “flawed” or “unbalanced.” This isn’t true of every Yoshi game, but Crafted World is indeed not all that difficult. I find it irrelevant. The gameplay is engaging and the presentation is spectacular; that it doesn’t deliver tension and stress is immaterial to how solid a production this is. If “easy” isn’t someone’s thing, then perhaps Yoshi’s Crafted World isn’t for that person— which is a real pity.

Yoshi's Crafted World Little Big Planet 4

Easy doesn’t mean a lack of fun, and if Yoshi’s Crafted World is anything, it’s fun. Good Feel has very nearly perfected its quirky practice of hyper-stylized visuals fused with quality gameplay. As ever, the pure joy of hurling eggs at encroaching Shy Guys and Piranha Plants remains one of the biggest draws in all of video games. The new, multilayered stages composed from bric a brac are charming to the max. There’s also a bevy of unlockable goodies, including a multitude of cute costumes to dress Yoshi in, and that will keep players busy returning to Crafted World’s numerous stages for a good, long time. It won’t tax any but the youngest and/or newest of video game players, but then, to butcher a quote from former IGN staffer Audrey Drake, it’s not like anyone is complaining if a sundae is easy to eat. Yoshi’s Crafted World is a sundae with a cherry on top. Go eat it.