Mike's first exposure to video games was when his parents bought him a Game Boy and a copy of Kirby's Dream Land. Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls. It’s fit for all ages.Ĭolorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.ĭeaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Outside of a few written tutorial prompts, there is no dialogue in Ynglet, spoken or otherwise, and audio cues play zero vital role in the game. There’s no violence or anything objectionable.

Parents: As of press time, this game has not been rated by the ESRB. Approximately two hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Rating: 7.5 out of 10ĭisclosures: This game is developed by Nifflas and published by Triple Topping. At five dollars, it’s an easy game to recommend… just a difficult game to truly love. It’s a shame for something so beautiful and pure to leave me so emotionally cold, but it’s a tight, wholly unique platformer nonetheless. Ynglet includes a “2013 game jam prototype.” I don’t know if the game has been in ongoing development for all of that time, but the care and confidence in Ynglet’s presentation indicate to me that this is meticulous labor of love. Although there are weird, intriguing little details sprinkled throughout (like the main hub being a map of Copenhagen) I doubt there’s any motive beyond creating an entrancing audiovisual landscape. The hand-drawn visuals are lovely to look at, but they’re just indistinct shapes hanging in a featureless void. While Ynglet is clever in this mechanical sense, the truth is that it’s also largely forgettable, if only because the levels themselves are so general and homogeneous. Ynglet squeezes just about every mechanic it can out of the single button that it uses, and then proceeds to find every possible combination of said mechanics, all in the space of roughly an hour and a half. By default, we only get one dash when we’re out of a bubble, but interacting with some of these objects refills our charge, leading to sequences in which we’re executing multiple steps in a single jump.ĭespite its mellow presentation and a save function that can be activated anywhere (the player simply needs to sit still for a moment and Ynglet will create a checkpoint in that bubble) things get surprisingly tricky during the final few levels when it tests us on everything we’ve learned all at once. Ynglet gets a surprising amount of traction out of its one-button approach – we encounter red walls that only become corporeal if the player is dashing through them, blue walls that are only solid when the player isn’t dashing, bubbles that phase in and out of existence each time the player dashes, and so forth. Ynglet only utilizes one button, and it’s mapped to a chargeable dash that we can use to either add distance to a jump or to correct ourselves in mid-air, since we have very little control of our character when it’s not swimming through a bubble. In this situation, ‘jumping’ is a matter of propelling ourselves out of one bubble with enough speed to reach the next bubble without falling to our deaths.

While we’re in a bubble, we can swim freely in any direction, but as soon as we exit, gravity will yank us toward the bottom of the screen. Playing as some sort of micro-organism, we traverse levels by moving from one bubble to the next. It is, as its Steam page claims, a side-scrolling platformer in which there are no platforms. I was frequently delighted while playing, yet afterward it left my mind almost entirely. I have essentially zero criticisms of it - and yet, perhaps due to the abstract nature of its visuals or its complete lack of any narrative thrust, I remember only generalities about my time with it. It’s a game that achieves exactly what it sets out to do. Anyone who plays it is signing themselves up for an hour or two of stark hand-drawn animation, unique movement systems, and a dynamic soundtrack that reacts to the player’s behavior. A deeply flawed game can still be a masterpiece, while a game that’s a perfect expression of what it sets out to do can still fail to leave a lasting impact. I’ve long held that scoring a videogame isn’t a mathematical equation, where we start at ten and subtract for every tangible blemish. HIGH Our accumulated skills coming together in the final level.

Steam ynglet