Y
ou’ll be reading this
in January, when
Twitter is banging on
about New Year’s
Resolutions and
Easter eggs are competing with
Valentine’s plushies for shelf space.
But I’m writing this in mid-
December, when every surface is
covered with Game of the Year
notes and the local Christmas
market has run out of my
favorite cheese and macarons.I’ll get into why this December
framing is important to Yoku’s Island
Express in a moment. First, I just
need to say that I understand
macarons are a pain to make, but only
if you’re intent on making them look
nice on Instagram. Everyone else
should get the option to buy the
singed, mismatched, ‘which real
human has time for this ageing egg
whites nonsense’ macarons, which
still taste fine.
Yoku’s Island Express is a game
about a dung beetle postman who Ifling round an island using only my
pinball prowess. Said island is a
tangle of chutes, bumpers, and
flippers which I can use to reach
different areas or solve little puzzles,
all the while delivering the post.PINBALL WIZARD
It’s perfect for this time of year
because playing it means I’m
plugging a gap in my 2018 release list,
but via a manageable portion of
gaming. Yoku’s Island Express is a
tight, bright platformer which does
the thing it does well, and a) isn’t
incredibly emotionally draining, and
b) isn’t a time vampire (Assassin’s
Creed Odyssey) or a time vampire
with no end point (Fortnite).
One last quality which makes
Yoku’s Island Express a good fit for is
that in real pinball you can lose. But
Yoku’s devs don’t care how many tries
it takes me to flip the dung beetle
into the right tube. The closest they
come is counting how many times I
fall into a thorn bush. I can just
bounce around until I land the shot.
And so, I used a party blower to
startle a bat into crapping itself, I
punted a ball, which turned out to be
an egg, from a precarious ledge to a
worried tree stump, and I delivered
one of three massively overdue
packages. It’s like a to-do list which I
can actually complete! It’s the
opposite of an email inbox!Maybe nobody is to blame. Crates
are easy to miss. They don’t show up
on the minimap, although the way
you charged towards all of those red
dots suggests you weren’t paying
attention to that. And, hey, on my first
attempt I placed the crate on a hill
and it clipped through into some
unknowable void. But then I tried
again, making sure to sprint in front
of you so the crate would appear
directly in your eyeline. Maybe you
didn’t want healing, despite telling
me just seconds ago that you did.
HEAL AND GROW
In my darker moments, I wonder
why DICE created this new system
after decades of medical crates
automatically healing in an area-
of-effect around them. In other
Battlefield games the healing would
have happened automatically. In
other Battlefield games, I might have
been able to save you from yourself.
Maybe you think health crates should
return to the previous system, or that
you should automatically grab the
bandage as you run past, or that there
should be some compromise where
the crate automatically heals but you
can only restock your supply of
bandages by grabbing one. Maybe
you thought you were an analytical
martyr, your death a datapoint
arguing that crates aren’t working.
But war is unfair. Medical crates
require an active participant—that’s
just how it is. And now you’re dead.
It’s fine. It’s. Fine.
PHILIPPA WARR
THIS MONTH
Did the beetle
post office proud.ALSO PLAYED
GrisYOKU’S ISLAND EXPRESS is my favorite to-do list.
“It’s the perfect game
for this time of year”
The health is RIGHT THERE!THE GAMES WE LOVE RIGHT NOW
NOW PLAYING
Fruit is essential to the postal service.Fine. Die. I don’t care.