Yoku’s Island Express (Switch)

A few video games have tried to mix pinball with other gaming mechanics, titles like Sonic Spinball integrating light platforming and some control over the ball, but Yoku’s Island Express doesn’t mix it’s pinball and gameplay in half-measures at all. This is a game all about moving around an interconnected world, overcoming obstacles and collecting objects through the medium of pinball but also letting the player move around certain areas freely so they have true freedom to explore.

Yoku’s Island Express begins with an adorable little dung beetle heading to the island of Mokumana to take over as its new postmaster, but he’s arrived at an unfortunate time. The island’s guardian deity has been attacked by a new threat, and as postmaster, Yoku is tasked with delivering letters to the leading figures found around the island so they can unite and soothe the deity before it passes away and takes the island with it. Despite being set on a single island, Mokumana is a varied location containing snowy peaks, dank caves, warm grassy areas, and of course the more tropical areas you might expect. Despite the game needing to incorporate many pinball areas to facilitate its gameplay, there are also spaces where you use flippers and bumpers to navigate more normal looking designs, and then since Yoku can move around on his own six feet as well, he can walk through gorgeous areas that focus more on presentation than navigation challenges. All of this is backed by some peppy island music that sets a lighthearted tone but pulls back for the more serious moments and more mysterious environments, the main theme being especially catchy and setting a vivacious tone for the game.

Yoku’s Island Express isn’t all good looks and good jams though, the pinball gameplay pairs well with the Metroidvania-inspired open world exploration. Yoku’s adventure takes him all across the island, which is surprisingly open to the player approaching it as they please. You’re free to follow your curiosity pretty far and disengage with the main quest at any time to explore an interesting area you find, but there are some ways the game tries to keep you on track. Different areas will have certain objects or roadblocks Yoku can’t get by without the right ability though, meaning he will have to adventure around to find certain objects like a creature on a leash that he can use to swing from certain flowers and the ability to suck up explosives slugs so they stick to his ball and can launch him around or break certain rocks. While you do have the main quest to guide you, the different areas of the island are all having their own little issues that you can assist with, Yoku gaining goodies for helping out. The island’s size may make navigating between far away areas difficult before you unlock the fast travel option, especially since it requires dropping into light pinball challenges to backtrack, but the size of the world does mean that Yoku’s Island Express has plenty to find and plenty to do, perhaps the most important part of this huge world being that it allows the developers to place plenty of different pinball challenges around it.

Yoku is tied to a large ivory ball that serves as the game’s pinball, and while Yoku can roll it around when its resting on the ground, he doesn’t interfere with it at all when you starting hitting it with the flippers found all around the island. There are plenty of traditional and non-traditional applications for this pinball-focused play. Some areas will drop you into what is recognizably a pinball table and ask you to fulfill goals like hitting all the right objects to open the way onward, and while they are very rare, there are a few moments of pinball based combat as well. Most of the time, it’s a fairly relaxed goal to complete, Yoku often needing to find certain objects or activate the right objects in the table to complete the small challenges, but even regular platforming is handled here more with flippers than traditional input methods. If you need to get somewhere high, you’ll need to time flipper presses to launch your ball up properly, the game expecting you to understand how to aim your ball well but not expecting anything too crazy in regards to guiding your ball around. Yoku’s Island Express doesn’t punish you much for failure either. Falling between the flippers in some areas is the only way to really get hurt, and the only penalty for doing so is losing some of the fruits you’ve collected that serve as the game’s form of currency and populate pinball areas to give you more to shoot for.

Moving around the world and acquiring skills to better explore it is delightful. Immediately the game tantalizes you with the idea you can swim underwater with some submerged fruits you can’t reach near the start, so once you do get that skill, suddenly the map opens up immensely, old areas now revealing their secret depths. The same can be said for other cases where you finally unlock some new helpful tool for your adventure, the game happy to reward a keen eye. Treasures, sidequests, and collectibles can be found all over, and while not all the rewards are exciting, the designs for these diversions are so well done that it’s easy to justify going for a 100% run. A few areas do like relying on having an explosive slug launch you just right which is a little finnicky, but most areas are small pinball challenges about timing, aim, and using your extra skills to help you out. Your fruits can be spent to open new flippers and you can buy little aids for your quest for completion, but even if you don’t go off the beaten path, the main story makes sure to keep throwing new ideas at you. There are no score challenges, every area being goal-oriented in some way, even if that goal is just to move on to the next area. Just because the game is using the mechanics of pinball doesn’t make things feel samey, with the game embracing vertical open designs as much as compact areas filled with bumpers and walls.

THE VERDICT: Yoku’s Island Express is a delightful mix of excellent art and music, the reflexive fun of pinball, and an open design that encourages the player to explore and has plenty for them to find. Yoku’s Island Express takes the flippers and launchers of pinball and mixes them in all sorts of different ways to lay out challenges based on movement and on acquiring items, not punishing the player much if they mess up along the way. The island of Mokumana is huge, and while that does make it a bit awkward to navigate quickly, it means it can be filled with tons of optional content and various approaches to how you use the flippers to solve problems.

And so, I give Yoku’s Island Express for the Nintendo Switch…

A GREAT rating. Much of Yoku’s Island Express’s excellence comes from just how creative and inventive the developers got with the ways pinball can be retooled into platforming challenges. One minute you’ll be in a familiar set up like a real pinball table, then you’re scaling a mountain or moving up a tower between various pinball challenges all about gaining height. Then, you might need to hit certain objects to open a path forward, all while having little fruits to collect to make even an imprecise launch possibly rewarding. The new skills add that needed edge to make the exploration deep, but the game makes things manageable there as well despite the limited options for quickly making your way around the island. Saving the guardian deity is the main quest, but the small ones on the side have their own little stories and rewards as well, the player easily able to integrate them into their movement around a game that lets you do quite a bit before ability-based roadblocks crop up.

Ever since games like Sonic Spinball hit the scene with their mix of platforming and pinball mechanics, I wanted a game that truly nailed the feel of a pinball adventure. Yoku’s Island Express feels like it heard that wish and set out to fulfill it, keeping the simple physics of hitting a ball with a flipper and enhancing them with the accoutrements needed to make the world work as a cohesive whole. You can move freely when you need to and the challenging moments crop up when flippers get involved, but the game doesn’t just feel like a normal pinball game with a story and characters painted over it. Yoku’s Island Express is a varied island world that’s a joy to explore, you just happen to be doing that by knocking around a ball.