Nintendo There's depth to 'Yoshi's Crafted World,' and I mean that literally — the game's path occasionally offers an option for Yoshi to traverse into the background or foreground of a given level.
Not quite Yoshi’s Island beater, but closer than he’s come in a long time
Not quite Yoshi’s Island beater, but closer than he’s come in a long time.
- A playful parade of level concepts
- Mountains of collectibles to keep you occupied
- Homemade aesthetic is a treat to unpick
- Co-op mode is a chaotic mess
Yoshi’s Crafted World feels like a game Nintendo found rattling around in the back of a kitchen drawer. It’s an ode to the things you ought to throw away: the empty battery, a broken straw, the Blu Tack turned Dirty Brown Tack.
Its levels are built from everyday domestic detritus, bodged together with sticky tape and string, like the Frankensteined horror shows kids bring home from playgroup and expect you to enshrine on the mantelpiece. To call it a ‘crafted world’ is overselling the workmanship, and underselling the charm.
And what better playground for Yoshi, the closest thing Nintendo has to the shiny penny it lost down the back of the sofa. A hero farmed out to third parties for a series of ever-worsening outings that made you question why Yoshi was ever elevated in the first place. And it was an elevation. It’s easy to forget that Mario’s dinosaur pal was the power-up that got lucky: going from simple steed in Super Mario World to Nintendo mainstay in the course of one game. One terrific game, admittedly – the sublime Yoshi’s Island – but why him and not, say, Kuribo’s Shoe or Starman?
It’s up for debate if Yoshi’s less-than-stellar career could be pinned on the dino himself. Arguably he’s the least appealing plaything in the Nintendo pantheon. His vague flutter jump lacks Mario’s acrobatic accuracy and his reliance on thrown eggs makes him a bit of a bystander in his own games. 50% of the action is lobbing eggs at enemies or winged clouds, the other 50% is trying to harvest enough eggs so you don’t have to impotently jog past these hovering prizes. Not to mention the sinister soundtrack of constipated ‘hynnnggs’ that accompany these moves.
This is true of Yoshi’s Crafted World, too. The twist is an ability to throw eggs into the back- and foreground, turning pretty backdrops into target galleries, and giving level designers more places to hide collectibles. Considering so much of Yoshi’s challenge stems from ammunition management – ensuring you have an egg for every occasion – the sheer number of bobbing targets adds noise that makes the completionist’s work that bit harder. Yoshi’s aiming reticule does light up any item he can interact with, but there’s still a lot of red herrings designed to sap your egg supplies.
On the strength of this alone, Yoshi’s Crafted World could have so easily been another of his post-Island failures. The meat of the adventure is hunting for collectibles, which sometimes slips into trial and error. Designers have a mean habit of using invisible items that only appear when Yoshi passes near them. Forcing you to scour every corner of the screen is more like busywork than clever deduction. But it becomes less noticeable as the game goes on and you begin to spot these ‘notably empty’ spaces a mile off, like Neo finally seeing the code of the Matrix.
The collectible hunt is more enjoyable when they introduce proper puzzles. Using Yoshi’s weight to seesaw giant mobiles to reach hidden heights, say, or throwing magnets against tin cans to build makeshift staircases to distant prizes. Other pick-ups are tied to bursts of arcade fun – winged clouds that trigger timed shooting challenges or litter levels with blue coins to be grabbed against the clock. It’s even better when combined with other mechanics: bounding Yoshi’s pet Poochy through a slalom of blue coins is a particular pleasure. Any challenge that gives you just one shot, and injects a bit of urgency as a result, is to be welcomed in an otherwise gentle trot from start to finish.
“What prevents Crafted World adding to his stinker of a CV is a sense of playful experimentation missing from his games since Yoshi’s Island”
What prevents Crafted World adding to his stinker of a CV is a sense of playful experimentation missing from his games since Yoshi’s Island. With Yoshi being a more physically limited hero, the levels have to do heavier lifting than they do for Mario or Kirby.
And like Island, Crafted World has no fear in introducing ideas for a five-minute level and then binning them off, no matter how strong the execution or the potential for further play. One second it’s magnetised weight puzzles, the next you’re on the roof of a runaway train or vapourising buildings with giant robot fists.
And while some ideas are less welcome – jumping across birds reminds you how imprecise that flutter jump can be – the ingenuity steadily ramps up as the game unfolds. There’s a tremendous solar-powered racetrack, where you try to nudge your competitors into the shadows to slow their progress. And a stage where axe-wielding clown maniacs attempt to kill Yoshi when he leaves the light is weirdly unnerving; almost like a Nintendo take on Five Nights At Freddy’s. It’s perhaps misplaced in a game that’s about as infant-friendly as they come, but it adds to the satisfying sense that you never know what you’re going to get when you press A to start.
Mar 29, 2019 Yoshi’s journey to find the Dream Gems begins with Rail-Yard Run. This level will introduce you to the basic mechanics of the game. For in-game tips, remember to hit the Message Block (the one with the smiling face). Start by following the path. Rail-Yard Run is the first level of Yoshi's Crafted World, and the only level of Sunshine Station. As with previous first levels in the Yoshi franchise, the level introduces and teaches the player the basic mechanics of the game, including the Flutter Jump and making and throwing eggs. Rail-Yard Run was made playable as the sole level for the game's demo, released on February 13, 2019, more than one. Yoshi's crafted world. Yoshi's Crafted World demo out now on the eShop 4; Yoshi's Crafted World coming to Switch March 29th - new trailer! 3; EXTREME Yoshi bundle on Amazon Japan 0. Sunshine Station presents humble beginnings for Yoshi’s Crafted World — with only one level in Rail-Yard Run, it’s only natural Yoshi’s first venture is a walk in the park. Regardless, in case you’ve overlooked a Red Coin or two, we’ve cataloged every one of this train yard’s scraps in Red Coins, Poochy Pups, Smiley Flowers, and Souvenirs! Feb 14, 2019 Published on Feb 13, 2019 This video shows a complete walkthrough of Rail-Yard Run (Sunshine Station) from the Yoshi's Crafted World DEMO on Nintendo Switch. This includes the locations of all Red.
This creative whiplash also pushes the game in exciting visual directions, as space rockets built from washing up bottles make way for a level played in silhouette behind sliding Japanese doors. The nerdiest twist – quite literally – is the option to replay levels from a 180 degree perspective flip. It’s a timed dash from the finish line, but played behind the scenes so you can see how the elaborate designs you explore on your first trip are actually constructed.
As a whole, Crafted World feels conceptually clever rather than pretty – there’s nothing here to rival the papercraft beauty of PlayStation’s Tearaway, for example – but seeing stages in a practical light injects does inject an ironic dose of magic. Someone went to great lengths to work out how these places could work for real, and wants you to appreciate it. And you will.
“Crafted World feels conceptually clever rather than pretty, but seeing stages in a practical light injects does inject an ironic dose of magic.”
Crafted World’s other attempts to pad out the world are less successful. The co-op mode is diabolically bad, hindered by a tight camera perspective that sees two heroes colliding and cursing. This is clearly a world made for one. If you are concerned about a younger player struggling alone, there’s a mellow mode offering infinite jumps, more health, more eggs and none of those irritating invisible winged clouds. It’s an exemplary easy mode.
A vast collection of unlockable costumes also makes a strong case for less being more – emptying coins into a gacha machine to unlock a reskinned box is not everyone’s idea of a good time, unless the idea of Yoshi dressed as a boat is a dream come true for you.
But maybe that’s the magic of Crafted World: a ticket to simpler times, when Pritt Stick and glitter equalled art, and not something that you were going to be hoovering off the car seats for months to come. And it reminds us of a time when Yoshi was deserving of his own games; not a Yoshi’s Island beater, but closer than he’s come in a long time. Nintendo should search around those kitchen drawers more often.
Not quite Yoshi’s Island beater, but closer than he’s come in a long time.
- A playful parade of level concepts
- Mountains of collectibles to keep you occupied
- Homemade aesthetic is a treat to unpick
- Co-op mode is a chaotic mess
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With Yoshi’s Woolly World, developer Good-Feel took Yoshi’s platforming adventures to a world made of yarn where the cloth aesthetic provided many fun and unique level gimmicks for the egg-throwing dinosaur to engage with. This time around though, Good-Feel expanded its reach outside of the knitting kit, Yoshi’s Crafted World integrating all kinds of arts and crafts to construct its video game world.
Despite the crafted aesthetic, the plot of Yoshi’s Crafted World has no real relation to the world or its creative visuals. Instead, a group of different colored Yoshis are lounging around near the Sundream Stone one day when the evil Baby Bowser and his guardian, the wizard Kamek, come to steal the precious item. With the power to grant one’s wildest dreams, the Sundream Stone could ruin the idyllic life of the Yoshis if stolen, but before it can be used for evil, the five gems that power it are scattered across the island. Now, the Yoshis and Baby Bowser both are racing to collect the jewels, encountering each other along the way and facing off by way of Kamek’s magical powers turning regular enemies and objects into powerful boss enemies. The process of transforming the enemies does embrace the crafted visual style heavily, the game even turning down the frame rate for the transformation process as it tries to make the combination of knickknacks and art tools look more like stop motion than the more fluid digitized look the rest of the game has. Environmentally, it is indeed a crafted world, every object made to look like it was crafted from cardboard, paper, styrofoam, twine, and other materials of that sort, although the characters unfortunately are a bit too well crafted, their plush bodies only looking like they’re made of felt in close-ups. Some enemies do have more interesting textures or designs, one boss being made out of a beach ball for example and some monstrous heads that rise out of the water looking like they’re made of glitter gel. Even if some things like the Piranha Plants look just about the same as they do in a regular 3D Mario game, the backgrounds and environments have interesting constructions, structures being built out of repurposed cups and pails, the underwater area containing fish made from cut up paper plates, and push pins being used almost like decorative flowers. An incredible amount of thought and love went into making sure the levels could be realized through real world materials and tools, and while these are certainly more complex than what a kindergarten class could manage, the effort to look like it could be conceivably crafted by an expert team of craftsmen pays off with constantly intriguing visual design.
It’s a bit odd then how little impact the art style has on the gameplay though. Yoshi carries over most of his mainstay abilities for this platform game, the dinosaur able to spin his legs after a jump for more hang time and elevation, slam down to the ground in a ground pound attack, and most famously consume enemies with his tongue to turn them into eggs he can then throw to hurt other bad guys or interact with objects in the level like hidden clouds containing goodies or objects that need to be hit to be activated. The egg throwing has undergone an important change since his last adventure, the player able to aim the targeting reticle freely about the screen while winding up to pitch an egg. To challenge this more free aiming style, many areas will ask for quick egg throws in little challenges or as part of fights against bosses, not really too demanding in design in order to keep younger players involved but having a small issue due to the inclusion of the ability to aim at objects in the background and foreground. Yoshi’s Crafted World is a 2.5D platformer, meaning that while it mostly restricts itself to a 2D plane, at times you may be able to walk into the background and foreground on strictly defined lanes. This is meant to help you better experience the many crafted environments, weaving into boxy structures or interacting with a multi-layer setpiece, but since your eggs can be aimed into the different layers as well, it can lead to some ambiguity. If an enemy on the same layer as you is near a target in the foreground or background, your reticle might prefer to bean the target with the egg instead of your foe. This isn’t a common annoyance, but some of the tougher egg throwing challenges can run into this, and since the game often contains fun little accoutrements in the backgrounds you can hit for a few coins, some areas do conflict with your aim inadvertently.
The egg-throwing awkwardness doesn’t hold the game back at all though. Yoshi’s Crafted World is still delightful and fairly easy throughout save for deliberately difficult endgame content, especially the optional stuff meant to reward experienced players for putting in the extra effort when it comes to collectibles. Each stage has certain goals you can try to meet to make them a bit tougher, such as finding the coins in the level that are secretly red coins, having full health by the end of the stage, or finding the Smiley Flowers that often require some small skillful action to acquire. Smiley Flowers are actually rewarded for completing the side objectives in these stages, mainly because these are important to paying cardboard robots who otherwise block the path to new worlds. Regular coins are useful as well, the player able to get crafted costumes from vending machines that serve as armor in the levels. These come in a vast array of styles, some based on items like food containers and craft tools, others meant to look like enemies, and some just fun ideas like Yoshi wearing a car or train costume. Despite the Yoshis wearing these sometimes cumbersome looking costumes, it doesn’t impact their mobility at all, instead adding some extra health to Yoshi that can almost be too helpful and weaken the challenge of some of the more difficult moments. While these costumes can break in a stage, they can also be healed from damage and reequipped after the stage if they do break.
While the costumes are a bit too good, the collectibles and costume rewards do give plenty to shoot for in Yoshi’s Crafted World to make sure there’s still a lot to do in a stage… but they aren’t the only extras you can collect. Each level contains a Flip Side, where the level is now not only played in reverse, but with the camera flipped. The background is now the foreground in Flip Side stages, giving a behind the scenes look at objects that were crafted mostly to look good from the front. Like standing behind stage props, seeing this angle is a novelty even though the reverse version of these stages is often simpler and not as exciting since the level specific gimmicks were already experienced and exhausted on a first run through. To make up for this though, little puppies are meant to be collected within a time limit, this game mode decent if a bit underdeveloped. The last collectible in the game is just poorly conceived in general though. The same cardboard robots that block your path will later begin asking for you to go on scavenger hunts in levels, asking for you to find an object or objects in the level environments. You can exit the level after you’ve successfully located it to make replaying a level less repetitive, but then the robot will ask for another scavenger hunt item… sometimes in the exact same level you just played. Playing through a level normally is pretty fun, Flip Side might turn out okay depending on how the puppies are placed, but having to go back in the same stage over and over to find an item you could have located just as easily on the previous visit begins to strain the level design. It is an optional objective, but an ill-conceived one that makes going for 100% completion more of a slog than an exciting prospect.
Despite asking completionists to replay levels far too much, the design concepts on show in a regular playthrough of a stage often make for fun and interesting platforming challenges. While the crafted aesthetic mostly impacts the look of things rather than how they are interacted with, stages have plenty of different gimmicks to make them stand out. Outrunning a giant animate dinosaur fossil, piloting a Yoshi robot to destroy everything in your path, piloting a solar powered vehicle in a race while avoiding the clouds that will slow it down, and going on an egg-throwing safari where cardboard animals are your targets all make for some of the more diverse designs on offer even if they are often fairly easy, although the level where you ride an airplane feels like its controls could have been done better. The regular levels have some decent ideas as well, such as a climb up the rafters around a rocket launch before finishing the level on low gravity moon surface, a level with clown dolls who come tearing towards you with an axe if they spot you, and a ninja castle with rotating rooms. However, for each creative level comes a great many tame or conceptually simple ideas. One level has traveling between cardboard cities on train as a gimmick but there’s nothing spectacular about them or anything too strong to do aboard the trains and the game features many typical levels where ice and lava are just used as regular hazards instead of interesting mechanics to engage with. While some ideas like autoscrolling stages where you try to jump through as many circus hoops as possible or kill as many moles as possible are different and fun for what they are, they aren’t particularly exceptional. Poochy the odd-looking dog you can ride is also present but not given anything too creative to do as well. What it comes down to is Yoshi’s Crafted World contains many ideas that work for making good platforming levels, some are even incredibly imaginative, but for the most part the game is more interested in how the levels are constructed rather than making them enjoyable platforming stages. They still have the strong fundamentals to be enjoyable and often feature some unique details so that each stage is a fresh experience in some capacity, but since the crafted look doesn’t intersect with the gameplay too often, many levels feel like they’re more about showing how a regular platforming stage idea was realized with the game’s specific brand of art tools than making that design function well as a level.
THE VERDICT: An incredible amount of creativity was put into realizing the world design of Yoshi’s Crafted World, but not as much seems to have gone into how the stages in the world play. Yoshi still has plenty to throw eggs at and many levels will contain a decent gimmick at their core, and some even feature wildly imaginative concepts or play styles that change how the platforming is tackled, but more love was put into the look of things than the play. Unlike Yoshi’s Woolly World, the crafted aesthetic mostly impacts the appearance of things rather than what gimmicks are featured leading to many levels that might go for visual appeal over exciting gameplay, but there are still plenty of stages that are delightful and fun to play even if the game is a bit easy and packed with perhaps too many side activities.
And so, I give Yoshi’s Crafted World for Nintendo Switch…
A GOOD rating. When it comes to its commitment to its look, Yoshi’s Crafted World is excellent, only the cases where a character might as well be using typical video game modelling standing out as something where more work could be done. The fact that some crafts look too good is a silly problem though and for the most part, most of the levels in Yoshi’s Crafted World impress with their commitment to theme, even if your interaction with the designs is often straightforward and the gimmicks are mostly tied to enemies, hazards, or gameplay change ups. There are plenty of solid level designs and boss fights to be had, but they only sometimes venture into a design that feels it asks for extra thought from the player or a different approach to completing the level. The crafted art style should have cropped up much more often than little ribbons unfurling into roads and the other minor instances where the world feels like its look is part of the gameplay side of things, but even if the game had been stripped down to a Yoshi title without any artistic approach to the visuals, it would still contain enough diversity in stage design to ensure it’s fun to play. If the costumes were a little less powerful and the egg-throwing less prone to layer issues then Yoshi’s Crafted World wouldn’t have any foundational problems, and besides the scavenger hunt woes, nothing feels like it’s particularly bad. It’s cute, provides a good amount of action and minor exploration for the collectibles, and it does at least keep presenting new level ideas even if they aren’t always the most creative mechanically.
Yoshi's Crafted World Clown Level 2
Yoshi’s Crafted World is an impressive art project that happens to contain a pretty good game inside it. Good-Feel is like a proud artist eager to show you their many creations, and it is definitely a fun tour even if you don’t get to spend as much time with each one as you’d like. Adorable and breezy, Yoshi’s artsy adventure does sometimes find a shining moment where creativity of game design and visual style go hand in hand, but even when it’s more straightforward and relying on impressive backgrounds to carry the stage, it never really hits a low point. Thanks to the work put into the visuals and a good degree of gameplay variety, Yoshi’s Crafted World is certainly well-crafted overall.