The problem with Portal is that Valve only made two of them. Those are some dang good puzzle games! And they’re not very long. I don’t necessarily need more Portal exactly per se, I just want more of that style of puzzle platforming that’s equal parts physical as it is clever. Hopefully, Yerba Buena, a puzzle platformer where you can copy and paste the physics and movement of one object to another, can deliver on that front.
Yerba Buena is, perhaps charmingly, perhaps surface levely, set within an abandoned video game world, the setting a slightly surrealistic interpretation of 1970s San Francisco. You play as Barb, a regular NPC that just moved into the city who gets roped into some kind of plot to destroy the city, you know how these things go. Where Portal has the portal gun, and Half-Life has the gravity gun, Yerba Buena has the Oscillator (not a gun, I guess), a device that can log the physics and movement of one thing, and apply it to another.
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Say, for example, you come across a bouncy castle. You can copy its bounciness, and then paste it onto a car, allowing you to jump up somewhere you couldn’t access before. Or maybe there’s a sign of a hotel that moves up and down; you can apply that to a balcony to make progress in a particular building. You can also just turn things into straight up air! For the most part the tech does seem to be about moving things about judging from the trailers, but you can mix and match these various traits. It’s described as one of those kinds of games with no one correct answer.
The only conceptual knock on it right now is that the joy of Portal is the simplicity in the things you can do. You can put one portal one place, and a second portal another. Everything else is about manipulating the environment with your portals. I wonder if by only having a handful of physics options, whether Yerba Buena won’t quite be playful enough. We can all find out together though, as it just launched today, and even has a demo too, which you can check out on Steam.
