Review: Yoshi’s Crafted World Turns the Mundane Into the Stuff of Dreams

To enjoy the game is to believe that there can be purpose or joy in peeking around the most distant corners of our world.

Yoshi's Crafted World
Photo: Nintendo

In a gaming landscape that doesn’t lack for vast, sprawling epics, mercenary time-wasters, unspeakable horrors, and indomitable challenges requiring nothing short of spiritual discipline, there’s perhaps nothing more revolutionary than a game where you collect smiley-faced flowers across a world made out of discarded cereal boxes. Yoshi’s Crafted World is nothing short of a delight, and that’s because and not in spite of its ease and relative emptiness in terms of what it asks of the player. It’s a firm reminder of the value games can have beyond putting your skill to the test, or pushing you to only earn or collect countless stuff, exhibiting the value of a well-imagined game world that exists for its own sake.

Of course, the game is still built on a basic platformer framework. Bowser Jr. and Magikoopa leader Kamek sneak onto Yoshi’s island to try and steal the Sunstone, a wish-granting tablet made up of five Dream Gems. When this thievery causes the Sunstone to break, scattering all the gems across the island, Yoshi and his buds must trek across the island to grab them before Jr. and Kamek do. It’s standard fare, but playing a Nintendo platformer for the story is like listening to Taylor Swift for the insight into Bolshevik influence on modern socialist ideology. The “why” is a trifle in Yoshi’s Crafted World. It’s the “how” and “where” that’s everything.

Yoshi’s solo platformers have always been an outlet for Nintendo to play with aesthetics, and this time, the series has gone the next logical step from the yarn-based Yoshi’s Woolly World into full-on DIY arts-and-crafts territory. It’s an aesthetic we’ve seen before in games, primarily from Media Molecule’s delightful Tearaway. The comparisons end there, though, and only mildly to the detriment of Yoshi’s Crafted World. There’s no opportunity to craft things that are used in the game and can be shared in real life. The game is simply a well-crafted romp through a wide assortment of worlds literally held together with glue, tape, and string.

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Despite running off the Yoshi series’s same old game mechanics—running, jumping, eating enemies and making eggs out of them, throwing the eggs at other things—Yoshi’s Crafted World isn’t a platformer that’s about stopping the player from reaching their goals. It’s about the active, gentle encouragement of players to interact with and explore their environment. You never know what’s behind some bit of cardboard, what’s hiding in a papier-mâché house, or how the bits of trash you’re picking up will come together to make other things.

That last bit is truly the meat of this blissfully pure game. There’s no time limit on its stages, all effortlessly charming worlds awash in tiny, clever details, from train engines powered by soda cans, to stars and asteroids made out of aluminum foil, to all the little felt-covered creatures who wander around the place. Your sole duty is to see it all, peek behind every leaf or cardboard bush and collect what’s inside, which is hopefully one of the seven or eight Smiley Flowers hiding around. Anyone can get to the end of each individual stage, but the only way you can proceed into a brand new area on the overworld map is to find as many Smiley Flowers as you can. That means truly exploring your environment, which can be perilous, sometimes tricky, but rarely tense. You lose hearts when you get hit, but nothing in Yoshi’s Crafted World feels like it’s actively gunning for the player. Enemies are mostly there as a means for Yoshi to make more eggs; they’re a tool more than a hindrance. Even falling into a bottomless pit just means that you float back to the last checkpoint in the stage.

To enjoy Yoshi’s Crafted World is to believe that there can be joy in a long stroll, in being curious enough to peek around the most distant corners of our world. Aside from the occasional wacky boss fight, there’s not much more to the game than that, and doesn’t need to be. One of the greatest tests of that fact comes a few stages in, where Yoshi comes across a mother dog whose puppies hide in the stages you just beat. To find them, players enter “flip sides” of the stages, in which the perspective is reversed, meaning you see firsthand how every obstacle and background object is put together from the back.

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It’s here, for a brief moment, that you marvel less at the objects themselves than the madcap imagination behind it all. These are joys that a great many games tend to obscure, for fear that the magic will be dispelled. But the light, breezy, and welcoming Yoshi’s Crafted World is all the more magical for showing us, confidently and unpretentiously, that even the mundane can turn into the stuff of dreams when laid out in the open by the most talented and careful hands.

This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Golin.

Score: 
 Developer: Good-Feel  Publisher: Nintendo  Platform: Switch  Release Date: March 29, 2019  ESRB: E  ESRB Descriptions: Mild Cartoon Violence  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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