Yooka-Laylee gets another set of fresh details

EDGE has a lengthy feature on Yooka-Laylee this month. There’s talk about developer Playtonic, and plenty on the game itself.

One point brought up early on is that Yooka-Laylee felt “almost unrecognizable from the footage that convinced so many to part with their money.” The two main characters are essentially the same. However, EDGE says that “their world is a very pleasant surprise – significantly more substantial than we’d anticipated, with a scale and a level of detail belying the size of the team making it.”

Yooka-Laylee takes plenty of cues from the 3D platformers of old on the N64. Just like with Rare’s classic games, this one will feature spoken gibberish for the characters. It took director Chris Sutherland and composer Grant Kirkhope some time to remember how to come up with these sounds, with Sutherland noting that the team “spent a lot of time trying to figure out the timing and iterating regularly until it sounded just right.”

EDGE also covers collectibles in its piece. The best news about them? Each one will have a tangible benefit.

Here’s an overview of the different collectibles:

– Ghosts can be found in each world; one hides, another attacks you, and a more elusive spirit requires you to chase and catch it
– 200 quills scattered across the world, spread across race circuits and along vast, undulating minecart tracks
– Tokens unlock the eight multiplayer arcade games hosted by Rextro, which can be found in the main menu and support up to 4 players
– Tonics: RPG-style modifiers that also act as in-game accomplishments; ex: reduce power consumption of Yooka’s role, which could be attached to something like killing 100 enemies
– There’s a pickup which triggers a transformation exclusive to that particular world

EDGE also writes about how you can transform the world itself:

At first, your impact is relatively small: spitting out a Splash Berry to feed a raincloud sees it generate a waterfall that fills a dry riverbed, opening up new areas to explore. Choose a Frost Berry instead, and the river will freeze over, giving you access to a harder race across a slippier surface. But while you can move onto the next area once you’ve collected enough Pagies – the equivalent to Banjo-Kazooie’s Jiggies – you can also spend them on expanding the environment. This bolts on a huge extra chunk of level furniture, with a towering monument that dwarfs what was there before (and which begs to be scaled), and opens up a broader range of activities, this time set at a higher difficulty to test the platforming pluck of more thorough explorers.

Finally, a few other tidbits:

– Regain health by collecting butterflies
– Refill the power meter by eating butterflies
– New Game+ mode will be included where all moves are unlocked from the beginning
– Spend Quills to extend Yooka and Laylee’s move sets; ex: sonar shot for Laylee which fires translucent waves and triggers invisible platforms to reach a previously inaccessible temple area
– When you unlock a new world, Trowzer will give you a new power as a way of thanking you for letting him expand his business
– Challenges won’t be repeated across the different worlds; the team wants to constantly surprise players
– The challenge ramps up in the second world, which has a wintry theme

There’s quite a bit more from EDGE’s article, including new screenshots, comments from the development team, and more. We encourage you to pick up the full issue here.