Yoshi has been a main staple in many Super Mario games and is a fairly iconic character in the Nintendo stable of characters. His most successful spin off games have been the Yoshi’s Island set of games. The various Yoshi’s Island games have always had a very sweet and cute design aesthetic to them, something that has carried on to the most recent installment. With all the talk lately about easy modes and legitimate difficulty, Yoshi’s Crafted World is a breath of fresh air. It’s just a comfy game to sit back with and enjoy.
Yoshi’s Crafted World
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Good-Feel
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: March 29th, 2019
Players: 1-2 Players
Price: $59.99
Realistically, the Yoshi games haven’t changed much since the very first one, but gone are the days of having to cart around a little baby Mario or one of the “babyfied” characters found in later games. Yoshi still runs through the various and diverse levels, swallowing enemies, turning them in to eggs and collecting various items.
The biggest addition here is the ability to throw eggs into the foreground and background of the different stages, helping you to find the different smiley flowers and red coins in each stage.
After the first few stages, you will unlock the ability to run through each stage backwards, searching for the lost Poochy pups in each stage. These “backward stages” are each a time trial, asking the player to collect all three pups and bring them to end of the stage in a certain amount of time.
These backwards stages aren’t just going from the end of the stage to the beginning. No, when you do these time trial stages, your viewpoint will be from the back of the stage, so you will get to see unpainted cardboard that made up the stage, or look behind the houses or trees or whatever the stage contained. It’s really unique and adds just an extra level of charm to the game.
In addition to flutter jumping and ground pound, Yoshi can purchase various costumes in each “world” of the game. These costumes let Yoshi play dress up and will take one hit for Yoshi, saving your hearts if you happen to get hit.
However, once they take a hit, they’re broken, so be careful with them. I will say, it was kinda cute having Yoshi wear a box and imagine that he was pretending to be Solid Snake.
While the game itself is really very easy, the game still offers an easy mode so that the younger members of a household or reviewers from other gaming websites can still join in on all of the crafted fun and feel like they are contributing to the completion of the game.
This easy mode gives your chosen Yoshi wings so that he can just fly through the stages, ignoring a lot of the platforming elements of each stage as well as most enemies. Beyond that, easy mode also gives Yoshi two eggs each time he swallows an enemy instead of just one.
There are other benefits, but those are the two biggest. Most players won’t ever need to turn this mode on, but again, in a game completely over-saturated in cuteness, seeing your Yoshi run through the stages with wings on just adds to the saccharine nature of the game.
There’s plenty of smiley flowers to collect in each stage, so while each world requires you to “pay” a certain number of flowers to unlock it, even if you don’t collect every single flower in a stage, you should still have no trouble unlocking each stage and moving forward.
You may need to go back at the end of the game to get a few extra flowers you missed, however. But if you’re playing normally and obtain the majority of the flowers and also do the time trials, you should be in good shape.
Please don’t misunderstand me here dear readers: The saccharine nature of the game is perhaps one of its greatest draws. Sometimes you just need to sit back and play a comfy, cute, relaxing game and Yoshi’s Crafted World has this in spades.
Each and every stage is made of every day items, from coffee creamer cups, to construction paper, cardboard, felt, and others. The seagulls in one of the stages are held up by little strings that disappear off screen. In one stage, you control Yoshi as he stands atop a plane made up of cardboard tubes and buttons.
While the enemies mostly are what we have seen from previous games and not normally made up of different items, they too are just incredibly adorable.
I almost felt bad at times swallowing the shy-guys I found in a stage and the only reason I felt bad was because they were doing nothing more than just playing catch with a coin.
Each of the different worlds and stages are very different from one another, leading to an incredibly diverse and eclectic series of stages for the player to explore through. Not every stage is just go from point A to point B.
Some stages will have you control a giant toy robot version of Yoshi, where you have to break as many cardboard houses and construction paper trees as you can. Another stage will have you running from a giant drybones dinosaur while attempting to still collect all of the smiley flowers and red coins as the stage moves forward.
If you really want to collect every red coin and smiley flower, some of these stages will actually put you to the test, but for the most part, the game is just a very sweet and laid back platformer.
There really isn’t much to say about the story in this game, as it has nothing more than just the bare basics for this category. At the start of the game, you will see a bunch of Yoshi frolicking in front of the Sunbeam Stone. Shortly after, the magician Kamek and Bowser Jr. show up and attempt to steal the Sunbeam Stone.
During the ensuing tug of war, the Sunbeam Stone gives up the ghost and scatters the 5 gems it held to the far corners of the world. After that, one or two intrepid Yoshi set out to find the gems and bring light back to the Sunbeam Stone. Which they do, and it is heart warming. Sorry if I just spoiled everything for you dear readers, but I figured you would want to know.
All in all, Yoshi’s Crafted World is a fun little game that will warm the heart and offer many many hours of cuteness overload.
As you traverse the different worlds and stages, you’ll take in all of the many ways Good-Feel was able to take ordinary items and make a very cute and vibrant game. Outside of the most hardcore of hardcore platformer enthusiasts, most players will find the game fairly easy with one or two stages putting you to the test.
And if you still find the game a bit too difficult, or you just want to see Yoshi with wings, you can always change the difficulty of the game, even mid stage, to make the game more accessible for yourself.
If you’re looking for a cute and comfy game to play and just want a nice, relaxing experience that will make your heart melt, by all means, you could do a lot worse than picking up Yoshi’s Crafted World. It’s a fun little diversion that will just make you feel happy and lighten your heart.
Yoshi’s Crafted World was reviewed on Nintendo Switch using a review copy provided by Nintendo. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here.
