Haiku, Silent Film, and Why Yooka-Laylee Matters
Over the past month I’ve been really enjoying Yooka-Laylee. For those unfamiliar with it or who don’t play video games, Yooka-Laylee is a game from British company Playtonic Games. It serves as a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel Banjo-Tooie, two beloved platforming adventure games of the 64-bit era. Given that both are still some of the best games ever made in their genre, the news that the team behind these games was coming together to create something new was no small deal; following the debut of Yooka-Laylee's Kickstarter campaign in 2015, it became the then-fastest game to reach $1 million in funding on the site, as tens of thousands of people (and me) rallied around the idea of getting another Banjo-Kazooie-style game.
Yooka-Laylee brings a modern look to a retro platforming adventure. (Photo: Playtonic Games)
Now that the game is finally out, I am not disappointed. Yooka-Laylee is very similar to the Banjo-Kazooie games that inspired it. (In fact, it probably would’ve been another Banjo-Kazooie, if rights to the character weren’t owned by their original developer Rare.) But, no matter; I like Yooka-Laylee almost as well, and the fact that they are a chameleon and a bat, rather than a bear and a bird, does offer some fun new twists. And like its predecessors, the game is full of witty—and at time hilarious—dialogue, even if it falls back on meta jokes about the characters knowing they’re in a video game a bit too often.
Not everyone has been so satisfied, though. Maybe I’m an easy audience, since my expectations were only to get a game that played like hit games of the 90’s, rather than current hit platformers like Super Mario Odyssey, but critics have had mixed feelings about the game’s philosophy of mixing a modern look with retro game design. While some of these issues, like the wonky camera, have been fixed in later updates (the Switch version, the one I've been playing, seems to be the ideal, post-patch version), hunting down thousands of collectibles without a map, lock-on aiming for projectile attacks, and other quality of life features associated with current games isn’t for everyone. Chelsea Stark of Polygon, for example, argued that “Yooka-Laylee is proof that sometimes our fondest memories should stay in the past,” and GameSpot’s Kallie Plagge thought its “bloated levels and a largely uncooperative camera keep Yooka-Laylee from being more than just a nostalgia trip.” Overall, reviews for the game have actually been quite positive (the Switch version holds a 75 out of 100 on Metacritic right now), but with such divided reactions from some of the larger names in video game press, it raises for me some questions. When it comes to art in general, are there some genres we just can’t go back to? Why are some things vintage, while others are out of date? And are certain styles of work simply trapped in time, such that we can never effectively return to them again?
The Artist (Photo: The Weinstein Company)
It's hard to think of work in quite the same boat as Yooka-Laylee, designed with modern tools and technology but intentionally meant to feel like a product of another era. The lack of work like this is perhaps part of what makes it hard to evaluate. One example I can think of is 2011's The Artist, the silent, black and white film (and Oscar-winner for Best Picture) set in 1927 that deliberately recreates the look and feel of films of that time. The movie was so acclaimed that clearly its limitation in color and sound were not an issue—indeed they seemed to be a core part of its appeal, and a statement on the primacy of storytelling over any other of film’s bells and whistles. There are musicians, like Bob Dylan, who record their current work with oldschool techniques and technology, and I'm also reminded of ancient poetry forms, like haiku or senryu, that are still popular today, as people embrace working within their restraints. So clearly what Playtonic is doing is not without precedent. And while I can understand the counterarguments to this—these other examples were using old methods to make good art, whereas Yooka-Laylee was for some tedious or boring—it makes me wonder how many critics went into the game looking at its limitations not as mistakes but intentional formal parameters. Parameters that might, actually, qualify it as a new genre subcategory. (There was a time, of course, when silent films were just films. But now, haven't they become a category of their own?) Or put another way, are we comparing chess to checkers, and forgetting that checkers is still a deep game with its own devoted following—just one with a different, simpler set of rules?
The creators of Yooka-Laylee were clearly going for a game that not only reminded people of games of the 90’s, but played like a game from the 90’s. (They’re even working on a demaster now, with blocky polygonal graphics meant to recreate the look of a Nintendo 64 game.) There are scores of current games that nod to ones of the past, but few that also choose to intentionally include some of the gameplay limits of their predecessors as well. True, it isn't without its weaknesses. The level design isn’t as tight as the Banjo-Kazooie games that inspired it, and I'd still prefer most games adhere to modern conventions. But when in spite of those flaws it’s still this much fun, maybe modern techniques don’t matter quite as much as we think they do. And maybe that was Playtonic’s argument all along.