Yoshi’s Cookie (SNES)
Yoshi’s Cookie is a cute color-matching puzzle game where the pieces take on the form of baked treats, and despite the simple idea, it’s actually been a game that’s been iterated on time and time again across it’s many releases. The first time around on the NES, Mario was willing to get dressed up as a chef for his role working the cookie matching machine, but over on Game Boy you got multiplayer matches. The SNES adds in another mode on top of that with it’s dedicated puzzle mode, and then even the SNES version would receive a special release with an actual real world oven and a new mode that teaches you how to make cookies in real life. Even its inclusion in the Japanese-exclusive Nintendo Puzzle Collection on GameCube saw it receiving a Story mode where you face-off against various Mario series enemies in versus matches. It might seem like picking the right version of the game to play might be a tough choice thanks to the limited availability of the more advanced versions, but the Super Nintendo release seems to sit nicely in the middle, offering most forms of the substantially unique content.
No matter the mode or release though, the fundamentals of Yoshi’s Cookie are fairly consistent. When a round of play starts, you’ll see a group of cookies in the bottom left corner of the play area. The goal of a round is to clear all cookies, the player needing to line up ones of the same type either horizontally or vertically to make them disappear. Yoshi’s Cookie on SNES uses some bright confections to differentiate its cookies well, a red heart shaped one, an orange daisy design, and one with a green dot in the center stand out very well, making the more plainly colored checkerboard patterned cookie and ring-shaped one able to still be distinct thanks to their present company. It’s very important to be able to identify where a match can be made at a glance in Yoshi’s Cookie because the action can get quite frantic if you let too many cookies enter play. Gradually, cookies will come in from the right and from above, but how many appear is based on how many are still on the field. If there are five rows of three cookies each for example, one five-cookie tall column will come in from the side as a three cookie long row will drop in from above. It is crucial to try and manage the height and length of the cookie cluster, too much work depleting only one angle meaning the other can end up becoming harder and harder to match over time. You’ll lose if more cookies can’t enter from above or the right, some helpful beeps alerting you when you’re getting close to elimination. Your means of moving the cookies around is thankfully pretty straightforward. Hold down A on a spot and you can now move pieces up and down or side to side, pieces wrapping around the sides should they reach the edge. Matching enough of a specific cookie type will cause the special Yoshi cookie to appear, this piece working like a wild card of sorts as you can use it to fill in for any type of cookie in a match. Trying to generate some deliberately would be a bit difficult since which regular cookies appear is out of your control, but they do come in handy for clearing the board more efficiently.
When you start the game’s Action mode, all you need to focus on is making those matches to stay in the game. In early levels it will be incredibly easy to make matches and clear them. In fact, the early layouts are practically free since they’re positioned to be so quick to solve new pieces might not even enter the play field. When you do get to higher levels the speed of play will increase quite a bit though, but the game still tries to keep things manageable. If you’re on your last few cookies for example, the game starts to favor putting matching cookies in play to help you wrap things up, a win not a gimme at that point but Action mode at least recognizes clearing the big cluster of cookies is the truer challenge than managing a small set. When too many cookies are in play it can be come quite unwieldy trying to line up treats across so many lines, the coloration of the pieces coming in handy for quickly spotting where swift matches can be made so you don’t get overwhelmed and can keep pushing forward into new rounds. Action mode has 100 stages sorted into 10 “rounds”, these mostly differentiated by their Super Mario World inspired backgrounds and the increased speed, although once you reach a new set of “rounds” you’ll usually have a stage or two ease you in before they get back up to speed. Between these 10 level chunks you also see silly scenes of Mario running after a runaway cookie, although perhaps the catchy music playing over them is the bigger highlight. Generally, Yoshi’s Cookie has a surprisingly good soundtrack, both in terms of having memorable melodies and sounds that suit the state of play with more meditative music and frantic tracks to match the shifting degrees of pressure.
This puzzle game also offers a dedicated Puzzle mode where most of the rules of Yoshi’s Cookie still apply but with a twist. In Puzzle mode, all the cookies in a level are already on the play field and you only have so many moves to try and clear them. There is no need to be quick here, the focus purely on trying to figure out the perfect way to rid the play area of sweets, there being 100 unique puzzles in total to tackle at your leisure. Interestingly, Bullet-Proof Software brought in the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov, to design these puzzles, and they don’t wait very long to get more involved. You’ll need to think multiple moves ahead and account for what the shape off the board will be after a few early matches to figure out how to completely clear all the cookies, this more careful work an effective contrast to the often hectic Action mode and giving you something distinct to return to again and again for some brain-bending tests of your matching ability.
VS mode is the last mode on offer, this allowing you to play competitive Yoshi’s Cookie against either a human or game-controlled opponent. The format of Yoshi’s Cookie does change a bit, in that you are no longer trying to keep your play area clear of cookies as best you can. In fact, your region of the screen is packed with sweets, the player not having to worry about losing because of it though. Instead, versus mode is a race to get 25 matches in total. The play area is five pieces wide and five pieces tall though, meaning the matches never get huge and cumbersome like in Action mode nor do they get too simple since you don’t permanently clear out cookies, you just make some disappear that end up immediately replaced.
Another major difference in VS relates to the Yoshi shaped cookie. No longer working as the wild card that matches with anything, instead you must make full matches with it, but there’s a pretty strong incentive to do so. While most of the time you and your opponent will be focusing on matching their own cookies, if you make a Yoshi cookie match, you unleash a special power. Some are as simple as reducing or increasing the points a player has earned through matches, but the three more drastic effects are Panic, Blind, and Slave. Panic scrambles all the cookies on a player’s side for a while, it actually taking a fair bit to unfold. You can lose VS if you take too long to make a match, a fuse on the side lengthening after each match you make but burning out if you’re too slow, but it thankfully won’t run during a Panic despite the lost time. Blind will block out the middle nine squares with question marks to make matching tougher, and Slave, despite the ominous name, just has a player briefly control the pieces on both boards, able to focus on making matches unimpeded or potential sabotage as they see fit. You can select different characters for Yoshi’s Cookie’s multiplayer mode, Mario, Yoshi, the Princess, and Bowser (operating under the name Koopa here) all having different stats that impact how things unfold. Koopa has a fast-burning fuse but his attack effects last longer, but the Princess has an interesting advantage in the “Message” stat. You don’t get to pick which power you use necessarily, they’ll just shuffle around beneath your character for a while and you want to activate them at the right time. The Princess’s swap faster than the other characters, but sometimes you may just be sitting and waiting for a while in hopes that you can get a good power to appear. Some powers can actually harm you if you used as well, VS mode sometimes quite hectic thanks to the strong powers at play but the randomness of whether or not they’ll even be possible to utilize.
THE VERDICT: The Action mode in Yoshi’s Cookie integrates escalation very well. Having to manage incoming pieces from two angles adds extra weight to deciding whether you go for vertical or horizontal matches, something that is unfortunately missing from the more straightforward matching of the hectic VS mode. Multiplayer can still have some fun chaos, but Puzzle feels like the better shift in design to the more pensive work of trying to use your matching skills for careful clears instead of quick ones. With some bright visuals that help the work and some great background music, Yoshi’s Cookie provides an interesting approach to the well-trodden world of color-matching puzzlers.
And so, I give Yoshi’s Cookie for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System…
A GOOD rating. The multiplayer battles feels like fertile ground for expansion, the small playfields and chaotic way of using powers holding them back a touch from being matches with more meat to them. You can still enjoy the competitive angle of them, but they don’t feel like they’re drawing out as much from the participating players as the gameplay featured in Action and Puzzle do. Puzzle is clean but challenging, figuring out the right moves a nice little test of how well you can spot some order amidst a cluster of piled-up cookies. Action on the other hand really understands how pressure can elevate a puzzle game focused on quick matches. Having horizontal and vertical matches be equally necessary to survival is already a good way to make a player diversify their approach, but the difficulty in one angle is intrinsically linked to another. Clear away a bunch of rows and vertical matches become easier to execute, but wait too long on clearing columns and you’ll really need to make long horizontal matches to avoid elimination. What usually helps a piece matching puzzler last is the need to think beyond just pursuing the first possible match you spot, a player of Yoshi’s Cookie having to manage the cookie cluster’s size or face the consequences. This does make clearing the field more satisfying despite the game sometimes tipping things in your favor a little, and since Action mode does let you start from your “round” of choice but not individual stages, you can at least hop ahead into the more involved levels so that the very easy and slow start won’t harm future play sessions where you want to see how well you can match under pressure.
Yoshi’s Cookie seems to be in an odd spot for people looking to play it now. The NES game appeared on the Wii Virtual Console only to be yanked seemingly due to licenses expiring and no version of this puzzler has been seen since, complicating that hunt for the best way to play it a touch more. Perhaps another Yoshi’s Cookie game with another new mode lies in our future yet, but no matter how you play it, all of them at least contain the game’s greatest success in the way the regular Action mode play was designed. Proper pressure and an emphasis on meaningful matches means lining up a bunch of baked treats ends up engaging and entertaining to return to no matter which system it’s being played on.