Balls to the wool with Nintendo’s adorable adventure
Oh no! Renowned rotter Kamek has just stuffed all the Yoshis on Craft Island into a sack for literally no reason. Thankfully he’s forgotten the green and best one, which is lucky since he’s on the box and everything. Now it’s Yoshi’s dino duty to find his friends and stitch the colourful clan back together. You don’t want to know what happens ‘or else’.
Playing through three full areas lets us confirm the following: Woolly World is eerily similar to 1995 SNES platformer Yoshi’s Island. There’s one crafty difference, of course: almost everything is spun from yarn. That famous flutter-jump sees Yoshi’s legs unfurl in a blur of cotton, during sprints his bottom half transforms into wheels, and projectiles formed by wolfing down enemies are now balls of wool rather than bobbing eggs.
But this is more than a purely visual change. The aesthetic informs the behaviour of enemies such as Piranha Plants, whose jaws you can bind by lobbing wool, and scurrying mice emerging from pipes who cheekily make off with your ammunition. You can even smother feared Chain Chomps in thread and roll them around to crush foes; there’s one chaotic section involving a dozen of these pastel-coloured wrecking balls tumbling downhill. This is Nintendo at its playful best, drawing from an almost bottomless array of iconic characters.
World of woolcraft
Speaking of bottomless, Yoshi’s gut is one of the marvels of modern gaming, not only able to gobble up and fire regular foes as missiles, but hopping embers too – he can use their fire to light lanterns. Watermelon, meanwhile, is chewed up and spat out in the form of rapid fire seeds which can break apart brittle cork scenery, and bombs thrown by Shy Guys can be caught on his tongue and lobbed right back.
Bonus levels are a highlight, if a little scarce. Timed score attacks, they see Mario’s mount morph into the so-called Moto Yoshi and speed across walls and ceilings like a sticky motorbike. Alternatively, Parachute Yoshi glides gracefully between spiked obstacles collecting gems, and the gigantic Mega Yoshi charges through structures and stomps on tiny fools. We just wish there was a way to replay them without going through the entire level again.
Fleece of mind
Boss fights take materialism to the maximum, featuring a spelunking mole who burrows beneath a jumper-textured backdrop before presenting his head for a butt stomp, a bounding pooch who cavorts in and out of the screen spewing fuzzy fire, and a fellow named Bashful Burt who you have to hit with wool and then use your tongue to unravel his trousers. It’s less sinister than it sounds, honest. Interestingly, they’re all regular enemies encountered elsewhere, just swelled to enormous sizes by Kamek. True to Nintendo, these fights adhere to the rule of three, and while hardly hugely testing, it’s telling they represent self-contained design experiments rather than bottlenecking tests of skill – this is a game designed to be pleasant, not punishing.
The challenge is pitched perfectly, Nintendo getting difficulty arcs down to a fine art. While early stages centre on the sort of simplistic platforming you could do blindfolded, it’s not long before certain puzzles will have you stumped. One Zelda-like level set inside a pyramid has you hunting down four keys to open a boss door, cavorting over swinging balls of yarn and tiny platforms that limit the number of jumps you can make on them. You can even modify the difficulty by collecting beads and exchanging them for badges which grant fire immunity, infinite watermelon seeds, and better butt-stomps. It’s useful if you’re having trouble, though hardly game-changing.
It may not be their finest cut of cloth, too short and perhaps a little familiar, but in Yoshi’s Woolly World Nintendo has spun a fine platformer which feels more like a cuddly comfort blanket than complicated cross stitch. Ben Griffin
Format Wii U
Publisher Nintendo
Developer Good-Feel
Out 26 June