Yono and the Celestial Elephants (PC)
When I started playing the puzzle adventure Yono and the Celestial Elephants, I expected, quite reasonably I feel, that the puzzles would be the game’s main appeal. It certainly had a cute look to it as well, but most puzzle games focus on their gameplay to the point some don’t even bother with a plot. However, to my surprise, the best part of Yono and the Celestial Elephants turned out to be its world-building.
In this game world, elephants aren’t the large grey animals that roam the African savanna like we know them. Instead, once every 1000 years, an elephant is born and tumbles down from the stars, these divine creatures having an inherent desire to help the people of the world with whatever problems they may be facing. Yono is the latest in a long line of elephants that may go back further than even recorded history, but coming into the world after so many of his predecessors has left a big weight on his shoulders. Previous elephants had intervened in wars, prevented tidal waves from flooding the land, brought incredible knowledge to the people, and so much more, and the moment the world sees an elephant has appeared once again, they begin to place all their burdens on the young Yono. Luckily, this young elephant is eager to assist, but he does soon begin to feel the crushing weight of his responsibilities as the requests go from simple things like finding objects for people to trying to prevent voting fraud, curing a blight that has lead to new members of a species no longer being born, and attempting to negotiate the power disparity in the kingdom.
In this cute game where you play as an elephant shaped like a little plastic figurine, a surprising amount of effort was put into giving the world a layer of depth that makes the actual puzzle solving feel insignificant by comparison. Across the game you can collect letters of the alphabet that let you unlock the lore of the previous celestial elephants and their accomplishments, and your adventure takes you to places like the graveyard where the undead Bonewights live and the fledgling port town of the sentient Mekani robots. The Bonewights are all too happy to share their philosophies about death and life, having completely abandoned most concepts of materialism and time to the point they don’t mind decades spent doing nothing and have no interesting in owning property. The Mekani meanwhile grapple with how to change from simplistic machines built for one purpose to beings with free will and no predetermined roles deciding their fates. Compared to humans these two societies are clearly second class citizens as well, leading to political issues such as the Mekani struggling to engage in the vital trade needed to create more of their kind.
Yono and the Celestial Elephants has a world with a lot more thought put into it and a lot more moral reflection and pontificating than you would expect from a game that seems to be designed for young players. Yono’s actual adventuring is rather simplistic and straightforward, the player never really asked to be too clever when it comes to the puzzle solving standing in their way. Yono’s adventure does take him to many different locations with some rather excellent background music that can range from energetic to relaxing to dramatic, but even as you explore locations like a robot factory, an icy mountain, and some autumnal wilds, the challenges before you are rather plain. Almost every fight you come across involves you doing a fairly basic ram attack into the enemy, making it feel like enemy encounters could probably have been removed without negatively impacting the game much. Some of the bosses are decent at least since they rely more on puzzle mechanics like activating switches properly to defeat a bone monster or learning how to stop a dog automaton that seems to take no damage, but charging into the same goblins you encounter all throughout the game lost its luster before you even really left the first area of the game.
The puzzles in Yono and the Celestial Elephants do come in many stripes, although they all involve you exploring the game world in an isometric perspective. At different points in the game, Yono can spray different things from his trunk like water, fire, or peanuts, these playing into puzzles where you need to do things like turn water wheels, light torches, or hit a target from afar. However, the isometric movement pairs rather poorly with the requirements for these trunk powers, as they all seem to have an incredibly strict range of effect. For example, if your trunk’s water stream isn’t pointed perfectly at some flames, it won’t put them out. The peanut shooting especially demands pinpoint accuracy, and while missing isn’t often punished, going back to refill your trunk after sometimes getting only a single shot is rather annoying. The isometric perspective means pressing left isn’t often aiming left but instead a diagonal angle, and even if you alter the game’s options to try and get around this, you still have to figure out the other aiming angles since they’ll be positioned in all sorts of directions relative to your elephant’s position. There is a button to lock your aim onto a point of interest, something that would be more useful if it would trigger reliably on things you are meant to aim at rather than the nearest object. This issue, as well as Yono sometimes finding himself on surprisingly tight walkways over drops as if the game forgot you were playing as a rather large baby elephant, prove to be constant little annoyances, but the game’s generally low difficulty keeps this from becoming aggravating as the price of failure is often just trying again immediately after.
The puzzle progression does go through a few different gimmicks to avoid things becoming stale despite the overall simplicity of the actions you’re performing. New gimmicks tend to be explored mostly within the area that introduced them, such as magnetism cropping up in the factory and darkness only really factoring into the challenge in the crypt. Trunk powers tend to get a heavy focus before they’re dialed back to become only small components of a new area’s puzzle type, but throughout the adventure you’ll keep coming across fairly plain block pushing puzzles and challenges where you need to get a key safely past some potential pitfalls. The important part is, even when some puzzles can be figured out pretty easily the moment you see them, they’re still making you think a bit about what you’re doing, helping to make the forgettable action elements easier to ignore in favor of the mild amusements of some of the more involved puzzle layouts.
Sidequests are a pretty common feature whenever you enter a new civilization hub, but the game seems content to make these all fetch quests in design. A character will lament a missing item or outright request it, and when you do stumble across it, you pick it up and go deliver it. Your prize might be one of the health pieces you trade in for more life or another item in a longer trading chain, but even the best rewards just tend to pay off with the health piece, the letters for elephant lore, or some cash. The cash is only ever used to buy new designs for your playable elephant, and admittedly, the color options and outfits have some love and effort put into them. Referential costumes, different textures to make Yono look like he’s made of different materials, and some mildly intricate patterns serve as neat prizes for all the cash you collect, but some more meaningful upgrades or items such as something to help with your trunk powers would definitely be a more interesting prize for these sometimes bland diversions.
THE VERDICT: Despite some issues with properly lining up your trunk powers and some rather weak concepts for sidequests, Yono and the Celestial Elephants is mostly an adventure filled with serviceable puzzle variety, a cute elephant protagonist, and surprisingly high quality music. It’s a fine adventure for younger players who may still find its simple puzzle design challenging, but where the game unexpectedly shines is in the efforts put into building a complex world which weaves political strife, cultural variety, and the burden of a storied legacy into the affair without ever becoming so serious it destroys the friendly atmosphere. All of this world-building is unfortunately shackled to some so-so puzzle action though, so Yono and the Celestial Elephants will leave you wishing the game was more about interacting with its world rather than its latest twist on the fairly plain block puzzles.
And so, I give Yono and the Celestial Elephants for PC…
An OKAY rating. Despite the Bonewights opining on death and the Mekani trying to figure out the ethics of a subservient people going to war, Yono and the Celestial Elephants is probably the kind of decent adventure I’d recommend for younger players. It doesn’t talk down to them, has the appeal of an adorable hero and a colorful world, the puzzles have substance to them despite their simplicity, and it creates a world they will want to learn more about. Adults can definitely get more from the unexpected excursions into philosophical musing from random townsfolk, but they’re much more likely to be bothered by how the level geometry feels an odd fit for the large baby elephant who apparently can only spray fire from his trunk in a single small line. The sidequests, despite being a chance to explore towns more thoroughly, really need to find something to make them more involved than just being a deliveryman, and the combat elements outside of the puzzle bosses would probably be best excised entirely or turned into little puzzles in themselves. Upgrading the difficulty of regular puzzles would definitely help Yono and the Celestial Elephants be more interesting to engage with mechanically, but if the game didn’t want to lose a younger audience it could always make the side content require more problem solving acumen or at least just have the designs branch out more from the block pushing and key delivery designs featured so often.
While much of the gameplay in Yono and the Celestial Elephants feels rather run of the mill when it’s not tripping over something like the flawed targeting system, the thought and care put into making this world come to life is much harder to forget. It’s the kind of world that deserves a better game set in it, one that can better explore the themes with the player’s involvement, dive deeper into the narrative, or just provide some way to engage with this fictional universe other than solving simple puzzles. The gameplay does come out to be decent enough despite its flaws so you aren’t suffering between learning about the setting in depth or listening to the quality background music, but being tied to a game that is simply okay really holds Yono’s world back from being as explored and adored as it should be.