Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair making the retro platformer more retro
Time is a flat circle
After looking back to ye oldene dayes with N64-style collect-o-jumper Yooka-Laylee, developers Playtonic Games are now leaping back another generation with its follow-up. Today they announced Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair, a side-scrolling platformer linked by a top-down overworld with mild puzzling. After more years and maybe they'll go through Super Mario, then back through Donkey Kong, Pong, and oscilloscope games, ending with unidentifiable games played with knucklebones and entrails. That can wait. Before then, Yooka and Laylee will go 2.5D later this year. Come see the trailer.
See? It is again like old games, except older ones. Water's nice too.
Dear Pip called the original "a friendly game regardless of whether you had an N64 two decades ago" in her Yooka-Laylee review "That feels like a valuable commodity at this point in time. Yooka-Laylee is bright, it's positive, it's daft and it wants to play with you. And that's lovely."
It won't be as lovely twenty years from now when Playtonic are selling a new Yooka-Laylee game as a leather pouch you open to discover Yooka the chameleon is a withered lizard tail, Laylee the bat is a live Daubenton's bat, and the villain is the rabies virus you're infected with when the panicked Laylee flies out and bites you.
Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair is coming to Steam some time in 2019. No word on a price yet. Team17 are publishing this one too.