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Pretty Pretty Princess Simulator

Plot Synopsis: After the death of her mother and with her fifteenth birthday in the not too distant future, Princess Elodie must find a way to get through the rest of her days until her coronation to be the new queen of the land of Nova. But the task is not an easy one as the responsibilities of a princess can prove to be quite the burden, and with everything trying to kill her at every opportunity. The road ahead for Elodie can prove to be quite bleak.

Long Live the Queen is the type of game that you boot up every now and again, and get completely thrown off from how engrossed you get in the game. Before you know it you’ve sunk a few hours in trying to save this princess from certain doom. Coming from small indie VN studio Hanako Games, Long Live the Queen came out to a surprising success after its release on steam in 2013, finding a home with VN enthusiasts and the YouTube/Streaming crowd. Giving the game a comfy niche with relatively high visibility for something so small scale.

            To properly explain Long Live the Queen, it would probably be best to describe how my first playthrough of the game went, after failing to prevent myself from being attacked by a snake in the first few weeks, I felt it would be best to invest in reflexes, and also spent my time in animal handling and faith as I assumed both skills would be obscurely useful. While I was partially right, Elodie still willfully ignored every bad sign she encountered and after being invited to her friend’s birthday party, I then found my agile, horse-loving, and devote divination expert princess being struck and killed in a wagon along the way, with no knowledge of medicine to save myself from the injuries, and she died then and there.

            The game is a visual novel, though choices are not the entire crux of the gameplay, as the game challenges you not just with the choices, but having the necessary skills to even make those choices and survive the obstacles. Princess Elodie can participate in many activities to occupy her time and these will give you the tools necessary for her survival. Whether it's studying archery and military strategy or working on your singing and public speaking abilities, the amount of skills is purposefully overwhelming as to provide you with many possible paths and freedom of choice as well as a keen gameplay mechanic.

Therein lies the rub with Long Live the Queen, with every passing week there is some new thing out there to kill you, or lead to your future demise.  Every event feels tense as you watch all of the games skill checks succeed and fail right before your eyes. Seeing what options you could’ve explored if you had taken the time to invest in different skills. It leaves you with a feeling of helplessness at the opposition, however instead of being discouraged, it has the opposite effect, invoking you with a strong determination to try again and do your best to avoid and counter the dangers you’ll face. This is further strengthened by the game outright showing you the skill check process play out in real time, showing which skills succeeded and failed resulting in the event playing out differently. There are no obstacles in Long Live the Queen that cannot be overcome, on the contrary every encounter has multiple beneficial answers, those answers however are only available depending on whether you are able to use the foresight to your advantage and properly prepare yourself for the troubles ahead, however no matter what you do, there is no way to have a “perfect” run and see all of the story play out in a single adventure. There are going to be events that will fly right past you and you will only be vaguely aware that you missed them, and some events that can only be achieved by actively choosing options against your best interests. Even after my tenth playthrough of strategically planned out skills, I was still finding new paths to open leading to creative solutions I wouldn’t have considered possible.

            It helps in some regard that a single playthrough of Long Live the Queen is rather short, only taking about one and a half to two hours to make it to the end on your first run, and that's assuming you don’t get offed halfway through your adventure. Since the runs are short it gives you proper time to plan and observe what skills you might want to invest in on your next playthrough.

Perhaps this time you’ll attempt to make Elodie an athlete skilled in sports and dance training the dexterity necessary to avoid attacks. Maybe you’ll make her a vicious tyrant ruling the country with an iron fist that will execute those who disobey her without mercy and yet has a surprisingly high interest in falconry. Maybe invest time into court manners and smooth talk your way through adversity with the magical powers to back yourself up if things start to go south. With so many possible combinations of skills and disciplines, the freedom of what you want your queen to be is truly within your full control.

As the game is not too long, it does make efforts to feel like the choices you made had an impact on the results and every decision mattered, even if had little impact on the overall turnout of events. Domestic disputes between commoners and nobles, the foreign alliances, deciding the fates of your relatives. Depending on what events you attend the ripple effects these incidents may not always be relevant to your playthrough, but there is still a satisfaction to be taken away from making the more informed choices.

You have 40 weeks to survive until your coronation, which will give you enough time to thoroughly explore your options. The first thing you do every week is decide what you will study. Afterwards any story event for that week will play out, always involving at least one choice to make. You then decide how you will spend your free time, these free time events are important as they will have an influence on Elodie’s mood, each mood comes with bonuses and penalties to certain subjects, (She’s not going to want to study conversational skills when she's  angry, but she will happily take up learning about weapons) many of these events will positively and negatively affect multiple aspects of the mood. The game can turn into a juggling act trying to manipulate and balance out Elodie’s mood to favor what skills you want to focus on, and  admittedly while it can feel satisfying when you master the system and can properly plan out how to best max out skills you want, it can also feel a bit cumbersome and an unnecessary extra level of management and observation.

Visually the game isn’t really anything impressive, the portraits for the characters look nice, but outside of Elodie they all have only one expression. The character designs themselves can look somewhat generic, but they get the job done. The character portraits are also restricted to only the dialogue box on the screen. Visual priority is instead given to the skill check with takes the center of the screen in any scene. The backgrounds are very lavish and nicely done, but lack in variety so it can get rather tiring to see the same castle backdrop over every conversation, it’s for the games benefit that it keeps your mind so preoccupied with the central mechanics otherwise it would probably have been more noticeable.

The soundtrack is entirely piano classical-like music, it's easy listening type of music and can instantly establish the mood of whatever scene perfectly with strong use of tempo and pitch. It can be very prominent and in your face, but that can be fitting for the sharp turns that the dramatic scenes can take, and while it may lack in diversity, it never got tiresome over the course of a single play session.

 It’s hard to convey but the noble unfair quest to see the game to the end was always drawing me more and more in. If you’re curious about specs, the game is simple and could probably run on even the most outdated laptop you own, its pretty cheap too, often discounted on steam to $3 making for a nice impulse by in a Steam sale. There was always a great time to be had with Long Live the Queen’s bombast and melodrama, and I was always eagerly awaiting what would happen next, and what new detail would show itself to me. I would always see things through without doubting my decisions, even when it ended in failing a magic check and reducing myself to a pile of ash on the warzone.

Review Score: 8/10

+        Story is just the right amount of sincere and ludicrous while also being short form in its events that it precedes to be consistently entertaining throughout.

+        Vast amounts of options available leaving the game greatly replayable and very rewarding in your choices.

-          May be too overwhelming for those that would prefer a more structured story

-          Can be needlessly difficult to get the most out of some mechanics.

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WHOSE GONNA SAVE THE PAGIES, IT’S THE DUO CALLED YOOKA-LAYLEE

(Disclaimer: This review was of the game patch 1.02, revision for patch 1.03 added below)

Plot Synopsis: While enjoying their peaceful everyday lives, chameleon Yooka and his bat friend Laylee are thrusted into an adventure when local evil corporate head Capital B steals a book known as the “One Book” from their home. Yooka and Laylee couldn't care less about why he wants it, but nevertheless the duo head off to climb his tower so they can get back what’s rightfully theirs.

I’ll admit, even if I know that these older collect-a-thon platformer games have not aged gracefully. I still did feel some excitement when I first saw the Kickstarter announced for Yooka Laylee. I have a pretty soft spot in my heart for the old Rareware games, such as Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, and Diddy Kong Racing, and seeing Playtonic Games, a studio of formed of former Rare veterans from the 90s era, was an exciting prospect. Their games always that felt that they were coming from an earnest place, they seemed to know what made games fun and had an ambition to their designs seen in all of their outings. Some of their ideas worked, some of them failed, and while their games may not have stood the test of time, they never faltered, and they succeeded in making some very prominent early gaming memories, seeing a game that echoed Banjo-Kazooie’s 3-D collect-a-thon design definitely struck a chord of nostalgia in me. I knew I was being pandered to, but I was still curious to see what they could deliver on.

           The 3-D collect-a-thon sub-genre of platformers was defined by the obsessive compulsive action of collecting everything in sight. There are items are scattered throughout all of the game’s open-world like levels. All of your actions are in service of gathering as many of the main collectible, in this game’s case “Pagies” and exploring each world to the fullest to do so. You collect these by doing a large variety of tasks within each world. Some of the tasks are simple, such as completing a platforming challenge, or collecting some finite thing scattered across the world. There are many more minor missions in each level however, to add some flavor to the adventure, be it a race against a go-getter cloud, searching for treasure with Shovel Knight, defending the life of an old skeleton explorer from enemy waves, or perhaps a boss fight against an octopus too lazy to leave his own home to fight you head on.

There's always a nice variety of things to do in Yooka-Laylee and while some of it can end up being conceptually charming, a large number of the missions end up feeling either unsatisfying, or can be infuriating to actually do. Either because of what is asked of you, or because the act of playing Yooka-Laylee itself simply just isn't very fun. Basic controls such as movement jumping and attacking all work perfectly fine. Yooka’s light and quick on his feet without ever feeling floaty or awkward and while his attacks are pretty close range, they’re also easy enough to spam and clear out threats no problem. Whenever the game gets any more complicated, such as needing to move in a direction other than forward however, there are some snags.

The camera is the most immediately obvious problem, with it doing a terrible job at following your actions. Often requiring the player to manually over-correct it to allow you to see where you need to go. Veterans of the genre may be used to this shortcoming, however it is simply inexcusable that it remains this sloppy. In all honesty, it isn’t so bad when just leisurely walking around, but when you have to jump from platform to platform under a time limit or perhaps use any of the movement abilities at your disposal, they are much more difficult to control. It’ll make even the simple act of just getting between areas a complete headache.

Just like Banjo Kazooie, there are abilities to be gained with each new world you enter. Spending your coin-like Quills, that you’ll also collect in each world. You can purchase a pool of skills from Trowzer the Snake, of which both the pun and the character stop being amusing by the end of the first world. This is an area that exemplifies where Yooka-Laylee misses some of the integrity of the design of Banjo-Kazooie. Since you purchase these skills in one place on the map, it can be hard to understand how the game expects you to use each of them. The point of the spread out molehills, the way to obtain skills in Banjo-Kazooie, was that they were always placed next to an area where the power was necessary. It gave you context for how to use the ability and an immediate situation where it was useful. With Yooka-Laylee some powers (such as Yooka’s invisibility being able to reflect lasers) are not conveyed to the player in any meaningful way, they are just dumped onto you at the start of each world and you are told figure it out yourself.

While the concepts of each of the five worlds in the game can be fun, the design of each landscape can leave a lot to be desired. The five worlds that you traverse through are greatly varied in themes and terrain, but it reaches a head with exploring and combing over those levels. The worlds are just way too large for their own good, and a lot of the vastness is wasted on empty space not occupied by anything, and segments of the levels can have trouble distinguishing themselves from one another. Some of the worlds can feel rather barren whereas other parts such as a tiny island can feel with too busy with collectibles and NPCs. This problem gets compounded and made actively worse when the game gives you the ability to expand worlds. The expanded levels sounds like a fine idea on the surface, to get more out of assets already made and to incorporate earlier game motifs with later gained abilities, but the end result is akin to adding another bale of hay to the stack you were already scouring through and tasking you with finding ten more needles.

On the level of an indie game made through Kickstarter, it’s easy to sympathize with the limitations that Yooka-Laylee was trying to work around, it would’ve been a larger undertaking on all fronts to create eight or nine unique worlds, so instead it was easier to make five worlds and stretch them all as far as they possibly could. However, its compromises work against the simple enjoyment that they were trying to evoke through the game. Banjo-Kazooie’s formula worked because it gave you a fair number of tasks in many compact levels. While Banjo had a max of 10 major collectibles per World, Yooka-Laylee instead has 25 Pagies in each. As a result it leads to every level long overstaying their welcome.

Unfortunately gameplay is not the only place where Yooka-Laylee misses the mark, as the writing of the game also fails to stack up. There’s definitely a lot of creativity put behind the characters and concepts here, but the writing itself always falls flat on its face. Coy references to other franchises and self-aware game humor can get a chuckle or two when used sparingly, however Yooka-Laylee’s writing doesn’t even try to hold back, thinking that referring to locations as “World 4” or addressing in universe contrivances for the sake of being a game is just the most brilliant new thing, and will always result in making a dialogue instantly hilarious. It makes sense reading into the credits that the writer is the only new member that Playtonic Games has on for this game. It all feels like the type of jokes that a fan of Banjo-Kazooie would think up, but lacks the refinement or charisma to actually make it into any of the games proper.

It wouldn't be so much of a problem if the game didn't make you have to endure the writing so often. You are given no options to speed through the dialogue easily, giving you nothing to save you from the heaps of text boxes you’ll have to read through for objectives and progression in levels. It can make even simple actions like going to the shop just fill you with dread.

           For the presentation at least while Yooka-Laylee isn't perhaps technically impressive, it does manage to come out looking pretty nice. Thanks to its art design characters and environments in Yooka-Laylee are at least visually memorable and distinct from one another. There is something that can feel stiff when in motion though, something weirdly lifeless and robotic in how characters and objects move. They can feel as though they’re divorced from the world surround them. Everything can still run at a consistent framerate and can be visually inspired. That is of course, when it works properly, as at least on two occasions I encountered the game outright crashing on me. Both of which were after a fair amount of active use of the system to be fair, however it should still be wary of the possibility.

Its disappointing to walk away from this game so negatively, because it is clear that Yooka-Laylee wants to have ambition, and yet, all of its ambition rings as hollow. Yooka-Laylee never feels that it wants to be inspired by Banjo-Kazooie, but rather it feels like it wants to outright be Banjo-Kazooie. It gets so caught up in its misguided attempt to chase the ghost of what already was there, instead of attempting to find what it could become. So it results in a game that has no identity of its own, and feels inferior to the identity it wants to claim. There are some points where the game can be enjoyable, but it's often muddled in a sea of external frustrations. With more refinement, more focus, Yooka-Laylee could’ve been a fun return to a style of game that had fallen out of favor, but as it stands, it feels like nothing more than a shell of what had already come before.

5.5/10

+        Diehard fans of Rare will enjoy the familiarity of the adventure

+        Bright presentation and delightful creativity can still shine through

-          Completing the game 100% can prove to be a tiresome test of patience and willpower

-          The dialogue of the game is groan inducing and filled with many more misses than hits with its jokes.

-          The archaic nature of the game design is more cumbersome than enjoyable.

 Addendum: Yooka-Laylee received a large patch 4 months after its release referred to as the “Spit ‘n’ polish” patch, supposedly addressing many people's complaints with the package. This patch improves many aspects such as the camera, the load times, and allows you speed through dialogue and skip important cutscenes. You can even reduce the amount of gibberish voices that you hear if you do choose to let the dialogue play out. It also includes many little quality of life touches, a moves list is now available from the pause menu, there are now huge signposts all over the hub helping you find your way to each world in the still confusingly laid out, but at least now more manageable Hivory Tower. Even little touches I wouldn't expect like removing the need to crouch during invisibility in order to reflect things, or making the flight controls smoother are very welcomed changes. A little improvement can go a long way and it shows that the developers really cared about how people could enjoy their game.

           While these improvements may still not fully make up for the game's overall design, it can improve the core experience and can allow you to appreciate what is there to enjoy quite a bit more. I would still never recommend going for 100% in Yooka-Laylee some objectives are still repetitive, some minigames that you’ll end up having to play remain to be just an obstructive bore rather than a nice change of pace, and scouring the levels for minor collectibles like Quills can be a nightmare. But the majority of your time will be spent in a more enjoyable environment than before. It isn’t perfect, and it wasn’t ever going to be, but the foundation it's on is much more stable. Playtonic Games care for their own property is plainly visible, and it can't help but make you respect their efforts on this outing a little bit more than before.

           Updated score: 7/10