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Yoku’s Island Express: completed!

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I have been playing Yoku on and off for a couple of years, on both the Switch and the Xbox One, and while I have a great time while playing it it’s not something I have ever been urged to continue. Whenever I’ve turned a console on, something else has appealed more. Then, on a 13-hour flight to Malaysia, the friendly pinball icon shone brightly, and I played through the rest of the game.

Yoku is a pinball platform adventure game. There’s no jump button; instead you play as an ant who is pushing around a big white ball, which can be fired off pinball flippers and bumpers to get to new areas. Colleting fruit allows new flippers to be unlocked, and you frequently find defined arenas in which you must carry out specific tasks such as unlocking a new door, or knocking out bungs from water spouts, or closing hatches to allow mined materials to pass through. You must go back and forth across the world, talking to people and taking things to them, trying to discover about the enemy who has attacked the island’s gods.

The locations are varied and distinct, despite being on a single island.

Maybe it was this going back and forth which put me off the game a little; the traversal feels just a little slow, with Yoku ambling along and then various pinball routes feeling as if they just get in the way. There are some abilities that are unlocked, including the ability to diver under the water, and to grab hold of purple flowers and swing around them, and occasionally I would spend a significant time trying to get past a certain blockage not realising I needed another ability.

And yet, when I played it for a long period, particularly with few other distractions, it really clicked. Opening the beeline – a fast travel network around the island – helped, but more than anything it was familiarity with the locations and a memory of how to get through them quickly. I delivered some overdue parcels, I helped rescue a spiderling, I found lots of little wicker people (but not enough to make a giant egg hatch). And I played through the story, collecting up the elders of the island, and then helping with the ceremony to cure the massive god in the background. A big plot twist later, I defeated the final boss, and the credits rolled.

Yes, you can carry on playing after the credits …

There are a few things that remain outstanding – there was a large icicle above a lake which I couldn’t break (with someone nearby hinting I needed someone to help me), I’ve not filled up all mailboxes around the island yet. I might return to this on the Xbox and complete it there, with all the side quests as well. It was a lovely game.

Forza Horizon 4: an Ubisoft original

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I mean, look at the state of this map.

Every one of those icons is something to do – in fact, often there are multiple things at a single location. They can be single races; they can be tournaments; they can be entire storylines. Every time I complete an event I seem to get seventeen new icons pop up. As a result, I often turn the game on and spend more time deciding what to do, rather than actually doing it.

I’ve been prompted to upgrade my difficulty, because I was winning every race, and so I’ve settled at “above average” because I want to win almost every race. The variety in races, cars, and conditions is superb – the changing seasons on a weekly basis means that racing in one session can feel very different to the next. I must return to the buggy race (where I came second) when it’s not winter and I can get better grip on the fields.

Who am I joking? I won’t be able to find the icon a second time.

Another Crab’s Treasure: sharing a drinks can

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I like the idea of the Souls games. Difficult games which you gradually improve at, learning patterns and strategies, exploring the best route to go. The thing is that they’re just a bit … grimy. Everything’s grey and brown and dark, and dirty and smelly and tacky and it makes me project senses that aren’t there. Anyway.

Another Crab’s Treasure is a Souls-like, but it’s not like that. Everything’s quite happy and colourful, at least until you meet other crabs.

It’s got a cute story as well. There’s a new ruler of the coast, and they’ve bumped up taxes to the point where little crabby here can’t afford them. So they take his shell instead. This means I’ve got to travel to the castle to ask for it back.

I took a wrong turn at first, and found an enemy who killed me six times in a row. Luckily, when you get near said enemies the game creates a checkpoint, so you can just get your stuff back quickly and run away when you realise you’re too underpowered. I then followed the coloured confetti until I met an enemy I could defeat, where I gained a new shell. I say a shell; it’s actually a drinks can. At least it gives me a little protection.

Little Kitty Big City: completed!

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There was an update, and there’s a definite improvement to control responsiveness and general collision detection. It’s still a bit fiddly at times and sometime it just doesn’t respond to button presses – particularly when trying to pull items around – but overall it’s much more playable.

The overarching story – of having fallen down from your cosy perch, and having to make your way back up the building – provided enough impetus to make me want to seek out new abilities and areas. I met a tanooki who transported me 2 metres into a bin, but this indicated that there may be more teleportation in the future. I found a beetle who’d dropped his phone in concrete, who needed a new one – that unlocked photo mode. I found a chameleon who is particularly bad at hiding. I found sparkling areas which allowed me to take a nap. I found a worried duck who’d lost his ducklings, and he game me a useful map. Eventually I found a fish which I ate, which gave me the ability to climb ivy for a short way.

The map showed me where the other fish were. I suddenly became very interested in finding fish.

Each of the fish required a little puzzle. In the shop, I had to find some way to distract the shopkeeper before jumping into the fridge and wolfing the fish down. On a roof garden, I had to turn off a hose to prevent the fish’s owner spraying me. Each fish I ate gave me more stamina to climb. After collecting all the fish, I knew I could make it to the top of the building, and back home.

Of course, I didn’t do that immediately. I found a few more hats, and explored the world some more. I spent ages trying to find a clever way into a fenced-off area on the edge of the map, before noticing there was a little gap between the fence and the wall (left below); I also spent ages trying to catch a bird with a ring around its neck, who’d land in a specific spot but fly off almost immediately (right below).

But it was time to climb. The journey up the tower was largely uneventful, although I did get lost in the scaffolding a couple of times. With four stamina bars I had just about enough to climb onto an air conditioning unit near the top, and then I was home.

The ending was very sweet – being given a collar, congratulations by the crow, and then another nap on the windowsill.

I can jump down again to complete missions, find more hats, and steal more smartphones before dropping them in puddles. I need to find two more rubber ducks to throw in the pond, and another football and goal combination, among other side missions. For now, though, this is completed.

Farming Simulator 22: not farming

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Nicholas’s current great interest is Farming Simulator 22, after he has seen a fair few videos on YouTube talking about the array of machinery you can drive around. He has been keen to get me involved in a multiplayer game, and after weeks of putting it off, here we are.

It took us 20 minutes to get a game set up, mainly because he’s installed all sorts of mods and DLC onto his Steam game, which aren’t available on the Xbox (or, in some cases, I hadn’t installed them), meaning our games were incompatible. We worked out what we needed to do in the end, and so I entered the farm with some trepidation over exactly which crops I’d be harvesting or sowing or watering or whatnot.

I needn’t have worried. This wasn’t a simulation of farming, it was a simulation of driving around a town in big expensive machines, blocking roads, turning other vehicles over, and generally causing havoc. The farm we inherited had large fields of sunflowers and wheat, which were wrecked as two large tractors had a (slow) race through them. An irrigation machine with large arms was used to block roads. Combine harvesters pushed over quad bikes.

We parked a few vehicles on the train tracks, not expecting a train to come past. For some reason vehicles clip straight through your avatar, but interact directly with other vehicles. We found that there was a large beetroot-picking machine balanced on top of a house.

It’s all a bit silly. I asked Nicholas if we could actually try harvesting the sunflowers, and he tried to buy the right equipment and it still didn’t work. So he concreted over the field instead, so we had more space to park vehicles. As long as I don’t drive more of them into the river.