In its efforts to channel the colourful, collect 'em up platformers of the Nintendo 64 era, studio Playtonic Games forgot one crucial element when it developed Yooka-Laylee: the game didn't look murky enough. It was crisp and lively and joyous, even if it did launch with some teething problems. But now – presumably after popular demand – the studio is releasing a patch that will make the game look more like something from the 1990s. It's optional, mercifully enough.

The 64-Bit Tonic update will release in "the coming weeks", free of charge. "To activate it, visit your local Vendi and witness as the game resolution crumbles before your eyes," so reads the update. 

"We’ve also capped the frame rate, limited lighting, shadows and shaders and applied a nifty scanline effect, to create the optimum 64-bit illusion. It’s the closest you’ll get to 1998 without chugging Sunny D in a pair of Dr. Martens."

Here's a video of it in action. Warning, it might make you nauseous. 

Steam's "The Classics Return" sale is offering huge discounts on a range of classic and reimagined games, including Torment: Tides of Numenera, Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition, Broken Sword 5, and Yooka-Laylee.

If you somehow missed out on some of these "classic" titles the first time around, here's your chance to grab 'em cheap. 

Here's what's available: Ages of Wonders III, Wasteland 2: Director's Cut, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition, Broken Sword 5 - the Serpent's Curse, Armikrog, Obduction, Tesla Effect, Yooka-Laylee, and Xenonauts. Each game is available with a discount of anywhere between 50 to 80 percent off.

The sale also includes the newly released Black Mirror, a re-imagining of Future Games' 2004 gothic-horror adventure series, plus a load of Shadowrun games, including Shadowrun Returns, Shadowrun Hong Kong Extended Edition, and Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall.

If you’re interested, don’t hang about; the sale ends soon!

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

Last month we rather breathlessly reported that Yooka-Laylee would soon get a patch, allowing you to 'reduce gibberish voices', among other things. Well, now the full patch notes have emerged, and for anyone unsatisfied or massively irritated by certain aspects of the retro 3D platformer, it'll probably be worth revisiting once the patch is deployed later this month.

Among the additions, a new optional camera mode stands out, which boasts "minimal assist" (I assume this means the camera will have a mind less of its own). The camera has been tweaked in other areas, too: there are less scripted camera sequences, and "door cams" will now appear behind the player.

Meanwhile, all arcade games have had design tweaks, and the aforementioned "skip the bloody annoying gibberish dialogue" has been confirmed. Oh, and cut-scenes can be skipped entirely, too. Here's the full list, while the full update post can be read over here:

• Brand new pause menu music
• New optional camera mode with minimal assist
• Pagies have added signposts to Hivory Towers to help guide players to new worlds
• Design tweaks to all arcade games
• Speed improvement to scrolling through Totals Menu
• New option for shorter ‘gibberish’ voice sound FX
• New speech volume option
• New ability to speed through dialogue by holding Y
• Cut-scenes can now be skipped with Y
• New moves section added to pause menu, with image guide
• Camera design improvements throughout game (less scripted cameras, door cams now appear behind player etc)
• Restart option added in the pause menu during arcade games and Kartos challenges
• ‘Sonar-able’ objects now have more clear visual identity
• Laser move no longer requires player to crouch
• Minecart control improvements and new visual effects
• Transformation control improvements
• Improved first-person aiming controls
• New first-person aiming control options added
• Improved flying controls
• When transformed, collecting butterflies now restores energy
• Hunter tonic now tracks the last 30 Quills and Casino Tokens, in addition to the Health and Power Extenders. It will also whistle at the location of the closest rare collectable.
• Health UI is now always visible when low
• Design tweaks in various areas (Black Hole in One, Gloomy Gem Grotto etc)
• New icons added for keyboard/mouse controls
• Improved Rampo boss fight
• Added PC Display Settings to the in-game pause menu
• Performance improvements
• Audio improvements

Like our reviewer Tom Marks, I wavered between joy and utter despair while playing Yooka-Laylee, but a new patch will hopefully mitigate the latter. That's because, according to Playtonic Games, the patch will allow you to "reduce those pesky gibberish voices", ie, make them go faster or potentially skip them altogether.

The gibberish voices are the game's stand-in for actual voiceovers, a harkening back to the way dialogue was handled in Banjo-Kazooie. Some love it, others hate it. Either way, the patch will let you enjoy it or smite it. You'll also be able to "skip dialogue faster" and "bypass cutscenes too", which is good for speedrunners, but also good for people who just want to fast track to collecting things without the exposition.

The patch will also add a "sprinkling of design polish throughout" and perhaps most importantly, there have been changes to how the camera works. More detail is forthcoming "in the coming weeks" no doubt in the days before the patch releases.

With thousands of games releasing each year, there's more head-bopping, heart-squeezing videogame music than we can keep track of. But we tried anyway, scraping through our libraries (and beyond) to find what we consider the best tunes of the year so far. Headphones and/or the subwoofers in your kid's car are definitely recommended. 

If you like the music, be sure to let the artist know—maybe buy a few records on vinyl, invite some friends and family over, get a cheeseboard way above your budget going, and let a track like Intentional Death and Dismemberment Plan direct the evening.  

Tooth and Tail

Austin WintoryListen hereTango and latin dance music may not strike you as the best fit for a game about feudal gangs of small animals at war, but Tooth and Tail manages to pull it off. Every song is played with 20th century Russian instruments that blend the dance tunes into something a bit more pastoral, and once the drunken barroom singing comes in, you'll want to start dancing again—just with a battle axe in the hand that isn't busy with beer.  

Destiny 2's Hive theme

Michael Salvatori, Skye Lewin, C Paul JohnsonListen hereMost of Destiny 2's music is fine. It's just fine. You get nice orchestral swells that imply drama and hope and a story much bigger than yourself. It's typical Big Game Stuff. But tucked away on Titan, a planet you aren't required to spend much time on, you'll find the creepy-crawly Hive enemies, and accompanying them is the best music in the game by far. With one foot in Quake's Nine Inch Nails lo-fi industrial noise and the other in the punched up, blown out orchestral sounds of a Marvel movie fight scene, the Hive themes in Destiny 2 narrate the action as much as they drive it, providing a stylish soundscape of scraped guitars steady percussion to pop alien heads to. Shame it's hidden away.

Ruiner

Various ArtistsListen hereRuiner's somber synth beats feel like a direct response to Hotline Miami's retro club boomers. They're just as loud, have just as much bass, and the melodies are just as catchy, but Ruiner's soundtrack brings a sinister sadness right to the fore rather than bury it as subtext. In Ruiner's dystopian cyberpunk world, everything is awful and everyone knows it, but swaying and lazily bobbing your head is still a reliable way to tread the existential waters.  

Sonic Mania

Tee LopesListen hereOK, so Sonic is good again (let's not talk about Forces), but what would we think of Sonic Mania if it didn't get such an excellent soundtrack? It's a surprising return to great level design for the series, but the biggest contributor to what makes Mania so endearing is its flashy, confident style—and the vibrant, energetic, and diverse soundtrack is largely to thank for that. If you weren't in control of the blue blur of a hedgehog zipping across the screen, the temptation to play air piano to the Studiopolis themes would be impossible to resist.  

Nidhogg 2

Various ArtistsListen hereThe trend of games with excellent compilation soundtracks continues. Hotline Miami popularized the practice, pulling from a handful of artists to cure an aural identity, but now Nidhogg 2 is the new champ. With a catchy, danceable tracklist, every track supports the physical comedy of its prolonged fights and the wacky new artstyle, but stays just as listenable on the dance floor or on a long commute home. Turn it up.  

Cuphead

Kristofer MaddiganListen hereOf course Cuphead was going to make the list. To fit with its Fleischer Studios animation style, Studio MDHR enlisted a big band, a live big band for its recording sessions. The result is a massive soundtrack of toe-tapping hits, each with the ability to get a room up and moving. It might be the most surprising and instantly likable of all the soundtracks released this year.  

Prey

Mick GordonListen hereMick Gordon of Doom (2016) fame is back on Prey, but with the fuzz and feedback on his electric guitars (how do guitars work?) turned down, and the reverb on his synths and acoustic guitars turned up. Prey's soundtrack melds the computerized rhythms of '70s sci-fi with the homespun sounds of solo country music, planting a grassroots vibe at the center of its digital sound, firmly anchoring the cerebral story in the realm of possibility. 

Dream Daddy

Will WiesenfeldListen here OK, so most of the Dream Daddy soundtrack is pretty simple, but the theme song will bore itself into your subconscious and never leave. Written and performed by Will Wiesenfeld, who also performs as Baths, the theme song channels the exaggerated romance and humor of one of 2017's most playful dating sims. It's also just a damn good song.  

On the next page, we list the best PC game music from the first half of 2017. 

Oikospiel

David KanagaListen hereOikospiel’s soundtrack is 100 percent intertwined with the game. Watch Kanaga’s GDC talk from a few years back to see what I mean—and no, you probably won’t understand, but that doesn’t really matter. Just know that Kanaga is a genius composer, treating 3D models and game mechanics exactly like he does music, because really, they’re all the same. Also, hell, Celine Dion has never sounded this good.  —James Davenport 

Night in the Woods

Alec HolowkaListen hereFor the sheer breadth of the soundtrack alone, Night in the Woods is worthy of praise. Individual characters and locations all have their own motif, and that’s just Volume 1. In Volume 2, things get dark. Motifs change with the in-game seasons where things get super sad and hazy for Mae, our favorite protagonist cat. Over the first two volumes, the soundtrack ranges from quiet and sweet to dark and mysterious with music for parties in the woods and city hall theater. But the real kicker comes in Volume 3, which is the soundtrack from Demontower, a whole game within the game. It’s a rad old school throwback that inspires headbanging of the metal and head-against-keyboard variety. —James Davenport

Nier: Automata

Keiichi Okabe, Keigo HoashiListen hereThe first time I entered the resistance camp in Nier: Automata, nestled among some felled skyscrapers in the game’s ruined city, I stayed for more than an hour. And it wasn’t because it looked good, or because there were lots of NPCs to talk to and items to purchase. It was because of the music. Nier: Automata is widely praised for its score—and count me among the people who think it’s among the best I’ve ever heard—but ‘Peaceful Sleep’ is something else. Its prettiness belies an overwhelming sensation of grief, which only properly sets in after you’ve left and returned to the camp a couple of times. The rest of the soundtrack is sublime too, especially this and this, demonstrating that even the most barren, unremarkable video game landscapes (because let’s be honest: Nier isn’t a looker) can be rendered otherworldly by the right music. —Shaun Prescott 

Thimbleweed Park

Steve KirkListen hereThe opening tune to Thimbleweed Park tells you exactly what kind of game it’s going to be. A cheesy, mysterious guitar hook invites you in and the elevator music convinces you to stay. Every character and location has a distinct theme, recalling everything from synth pop to a pixelated Hans Zimmer. There’s drama and jokes abound in Thimbleweed Park, but they would feel hollow with such a diverse, playful score. —James Davenport  

Tumbleseed

Joel CorelitzListen here Tumbleseed is a brutally hard roguelike with a deceptively adorable appearance and a soundtrack that’s shockingly good. Every track exudes the 80’s, sounding closer to the soundtrack for Drive than you’d expect out of a brightly colored marble maze game. Frankly, it’s one of the few things that kept me from throwing my controller across the room while playing. —Tom Marks 

Crypt of the Necrodancer - Aria Awakened

FamilyJules Listen here Holy shit. The most prolific game music guitarist on YouTube (FamilyJules) teams up with one of our favorite composers (Danny Baranowsky, of Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac) for this tsunami of guitar solos. There are a bunch of official, album-length covers of Crypt, including this killer chiptune remix, but Aria Awakened is the only one that will melt your headset. Start with Trial of Thunder. —Evan Lahti

C:\Windows\Media

Austin GreenListen here We loved Austin's rock covers of Windows 3.1 midi songs so much we interviewed him about making this short album earlier this year. They're wonderfully peppy. It's hard to listen to these songs without cracking a smile and tapping a foot. And they're also deeply nostalgic for anyone who remembers the early days of PC midi music. Hear Canyon.mid and be transported back 20 years. — Wes Fenlon

Yooka-Laylee

David Wise, Grant KirkhopeListen here As a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie Yooka-Laylee left a lot to be desired, but in terms of music Playtonic knocked it out of the park. Veteran Rare composers David Wise and Grant Kirkhope both contributed to a score that sometimes outshines the game’s own inspiration. Not every song is a masterpiece, but there’s a lot of nostalgia to love in this game’s soundtrack. Plus, it gave us this gem. —Tom Marks

Outlast 2

Samuel LaflammeListen hereMost of Outlast 2 consists of running and hiding, and Laflamme’s score has the percussive highs and lows to keep your heart rate steady whether you’re chilling in a barrel or a god-fearing murderer is nipping at your heels. But underscoring it all are light, sometimes hopeful string accompaniments. There’s a pathos in Outlast 2’s score that speaks to the humanity at the center of the conflict. After all, the bad guys are just looking for salvation. They’re scared too.  —James Davenport  

Hollow Knight

Christopher LarkinListen here This soundtrack meets Hollow Knight’s gorgeous animated art and silently assembled mythos right at the top. It’s epic, if I’m able to reclaim the word, and whimsical, the perfect accompaniment to an intense boss battle or quiet, solemn exploration. Give Crystal Peak a meditative listen, then go loud with Dung Defender. —James Davenport  

Flinthook

Patrice BourgeaultListen hereI hesitate to call Flinthook’s soundtrack simple, but it knows exactly what kind of game it’s playing for. Flinthook’s OST is swashbuckling chiptune majesty, an onslaught of fast, fun, victorious bleeps and bloops. It plays like a cheerleading squad combined with a wholesome, but slightly too competitive, dad screaming at you from the sidelines that hell yes, you got this, that’s my hook-swinger right there.  —James Davenport  

Playtonic Games is a studio comprised of seven Banjo-Kazooie veterans and the masterminds of the recently launched '90s-style platformer throwback Yooka-Laylee. In 2015, the team launched a Kickstarter for the latter—asking for £175,000 which it ascertained in just a few hours. By the end of the campaign it'd accrued well over £2 million. 

It's a popular game, then, which is why we invited the Playtonic team to this year's PC Gamer Weekender to talk us through the cutesy platformer's development, how it plans to emulate the greats of yesteryear, and how it stands apart as it brings the retro platforming genre into the modern age.

Live from the Gamer Stage, here's Playtonic Games:

Yooka-Laylee, aka the menacingly chirpy 3D platformer inspired by the menacingly chirpy Banjo-Kazooie, is scheduled to release on April 11. Reviews went live yesterday and, as Tom Marks wrote in his, it's far from a perfect video game. It's plagued with a number of issues reminiscent of the Nintendo 64-era, including a moody, uncooperative camera. But it looks like at least a few issues related to the camera will be patched before it releases.

That's according to patch notes (via Eurogamer) released earlier today. While it doesn't look like the camera issues are being fixed across the board, they are being addressed in some specific areas.

Here are the notes: 

• [Fixed] Camera will become locked in place after completing Gravity Room challenge in Galleon
• [Fixed] Grappling the seeds as they break in Planker's challenge causes erratic behaviour in Moodymaze Marsh
• [Fixed] Game softlocks and has to be reset if the player leaves the course and faints during the Nimble race in Tribalstack Tropics
• [Fixed] Softlock will sometimes occur on the Hub C slide if the player faints at the same moment as the timer reaching zero
• [Fixed] If the player leaves Brreeeze Block's room in the Icymetric Palace in Glitterglaze Glacier but remains in the world and returns to the same room then the isometric camera will be deactivated
• [Fixed] If player is killed by a bizzy in hub B and knocked back into the archive door at the exact same time, the screen will still transition. When the player respawns, they will be unable to move
• Performance improvements to various camera transitions in the introductory cut scene
• Performance improvements to Shipwreck Creek and Hivory Towers. Various areas have been improved including camera movement
• Performance improvements when using the light beam in the Icymetric Palace within Glitterglaze Glacier
• Performance improvements during the House of Cards ball roll course in Capital Cashino
• Performance improvements in the Bee-Bop arcade game

The patch is scheduled to roll out at some point before the game's release next week, so you shouldn't even notice it unless you backed the game on Kickstarter and manage to get it early.

The hardest enemy I had to fight in Yooka-Laylee was its camera. The hordes of minions sent by evil corporate book-napper Capital B were easily killed and often ignored, but wrestling the third-person camera into submission was like trying to get an actual bat to ride on the head of an actual iguana. Guiding Yooka the iguana and Laylee the bat on a quest to collect magical Pagies and get their book back from Capital B brought both a welcoming sense of nostalgia along with all the familiar flaws of N64-era 3D platformers. 

Yooka-Laylee is a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie made by much of the same team, and developer Playtonic Games has shamelessly copied from the Banjo playbook all throughout this revival. The game has the same cheeky dialogue and garbled character voices, the same collectibles to gather in each level, and pretty much the same exact moveset for your interspecies duo—all with a fresh new skin stretched over the top. But Yooka-Laylee also brings back the same terrible camera and dull combat, and aspects of what made Banjo-Kazooie so revolutionary in 1998 don't necessarily hold up two decades later.

One part that definitely did hold up, however, is the jump. As simple as it is, a platformer's jump can make or break the entire game. Here, Yooka-Laylee feels exactly right. Key components like high-jumping from a crouch or double-jumping into a glide feel natural and make walking around any of the game's five main worlds (plus a hub world connecting them all) smooth and satisfying. Missing jumps or falling off ledges, for the most part, felt like my fault—which is a victory not to be understated.

This may look like a staged screenshot, but it's actually just one of the horrible camera angles going uphill in a closed hallway can cause.

By contrast, Yooka-Laylee's wider selection of movement systems rarely reach the same standard. There are unique transformations in each world, and most of them are a mess to control. The snowplow transformation on Glitterglaze Glacier nearly had me rage-quitting as I unpredictably drove off cliffs—I slowly learned that the plow can't reverse, and pressing back actually moves you forward in a wide turn. A later move that let's Yooka grab onto Laylee's legs and fly for an extended period of time was nearly impossible to control accurately if I wasn't moving in a straight line, and glitched out visually if I went too high.

Camera-camera-chameleon

These issues are exacerbated by the aforementioned very bad camera. It wasn't uncommon for the camera to pull in uncomfortably close (and usually aim straight down at the floor) anytime I got just a little too close to a wall or a corridor was a bit too tight, which is the sort of nostalgia I could have done without. If Playtonic is trying to perfectly recreate an N64 game, then the awful camera angles are certainly part of that legacy.

Another example of a 90s holdover is Yooka-Laylee's lackluster combat. It's not terrible, it's just pointless. There are two main types of enemies you'll be fighting: a pair of bouncing eyeballs that attach themselves to nearby objects, and a generic minion that changes appearance in each world but only ever takes one hit to kill—or two, if it's wearing a hat. I could literally walk past the vast majority of them, but occasionally a few would get in the way and become a chore to clean-up with a basic spin attack, respawning liberally to make my efforts even more pointless. No attempt has been made to make combat interesting, and Laylee even says as much in a moment toward the end of the game.

Laylee says what I'm thinking so often it's sort of unsettling.

But these legacy issues aren't the only problems. Yooka-Laylee's biggest failing comes in its level design: the five worlds feel hollow, lacking soul, despite some cute themes. Each is an open sandbox with a smattering of Pagie-rewarding challenges to complete or puzzles to solve. The game's Steam page refers to them as playgrounds, which I think is a better name than 'world,' because they don't feel fleshed out enough to be chunks of some real place.

Yooka-Laylee also has a variety problem, often reusing tweaked versions of challenges and characters even if they have no relevance to the theme, ensuring the worlds don't have unique identities of their own. There are multiple giant golf courses, lots of inexplicably floating minecart courses, and so many mind-numbing, god-awful quiz segments that even Laylee got sick of that shit. I was sick of it after a single quiz. And none of the quirky characters you meet feel like they have a place in the world. They're just sprinkled around the map like Pagies—you won't find Mumbo's Hut built as part of the landscape, for example.

The Capital Cashino world arguably has the strongest voice of its own, taking place in a giant casino full of games and gambling. Instead of Pagies, you get tokens that you can turn in for Pagies, ten-for-one. I was hopeful entering Capital Cashino that it would be a more thoughtful level, but tokens were earned almost entirely through tiny and unsatisfying minigames like Pachinko and slot machines. There are at least half a dozen nearly identical slot machines scattered around the world, which felt more like filler than soul.

The themes of the worlds are genuinely lovely, though, lush with detail and each one very different than the others. Yooka-Laylee is a beautiful looking game when played on its highest setting, and I love that the UI is hidden whenever it's not needed. The bright colors and varied environments really shine, and are supported by some fantastic character design, even if they don't fit into those worlds. The music from veteran Rare composers Grant Kirkhope and David Wise is some of the best I've heard in a long while, and may even outshine Banjo-Kazooie's at times.

On the performance side, Yooka-Laylee ran at a solid 60 fps on my GTX 970 while at max settings. The options you can adjust are very limited, but thankfully I ran into essentially no performance issues while I played. While it's definitely meant to be played with a gamepad, it controls well enough with a mouse and keyboard if you prefer—though the camera is even more unwieldy that way. A slight annoyance is that some button prompts will still be shown as 'A' and 'B' buttons no matter your control scheme.

Playground bully

Yooka-Laylee looks and sounds like the modern 3D platformer the I've been dreaming of for a while. It's just that the actual things to do in each world don't feel quite as inspired. I really did like many of the jungle-gyms I was given to hop around, and some of Yooka-Laylee's more fun Pagies to earn were timed jumping courses which required real dexterity. But they were usually self-contained little loops that always ended where they began, meaning I rarely ever platformed to progress through a level, just to get my prize and move on to the next one. There's a lot of walking between things to do.

The more I explored each of Yooka-Laylee's worlds, the more they felt like a first pass instead of a final product. They all reminded me of the Toybox demo world initially sent out to Kickstarter backers, with different features and challenges plopped around to easily show off rather than be part of some coherent fiction. I frequently found nooks and crannies in walls that could have held secrets, but instead were just the result of boundary geometry not quite meeting up properly. While the contents of these worlds felt refined, the worlds themselves were nothing more than shells, and I doubt I'll remember any of them fondly like I do Treasure Trove Cove from Banjo or Dire Dire Docks from Super Mario 64. 

Yooka-Laylee is frustrating because it has genuine touches of greatness. It has a phenomenal soundtrack, cheeky and clever dialogue, and tight fundamental platforming that would stand tall amongst its inspirations. But all of that is muddled by soulless level design that's OK at its best and a swath of frustrating or repetitive extras. It took me 12 hours to beat the game, but that's without getting all 145 Pagies available. I could probably spend another 5-10 hours finishing off everything there is to do, but frankly Yooka-Laylee just didn't make me want to.

Playtonic did a fine enough job of recreating the nostalgia of playing Banjo-Kazooie, but Yooka-Laylee simultaneously revives all the bad parts of those games while never quite living up to the good parts. As a spiritual successor, it stands nicely as an homage that didn't quite hit all of its marks. But as a game on its own, removed from the context of its roots, Yooka-Laylee is an alright 3D platformer that unfortunately doesn't make a strong case for the revival of a genre I love. 

If you could stick a second joystick onto the Nintendo 64 controller and cram an Nvidia GTX 1060 into that old console, you'd more or less be able to play Yooka-Laylee on it. Playtonic's new 3D platformer is a pretty enough game to live in 2017, with a fun pair of heroes who jump with aplomb and have a lot of goodwill propelling them because, really, they don't make 'em like they used to. But Playtonic wasn't kidding when it pitched a game like Banjo Kazooie, which many of the creative leads worked on at Rare in the early 2000s. The jokes, the talking heads, the minigames, the user interface, the world all feel rooted in that era of gaming. That's as good and bad as it sounds.

Unlike an N64 game, Yooka-Laylee runs at smooth 60 frames per second, and kept up that performance even when I ran video capture on a GTX 980M laptop. Playtonic has found a nice colorful art style: characters look vaguely like plastic toys or claymation figures, and the world feels like what I'd imagine an N64 game would look like a decade and then some later. 

Much like the 3D platformers they used to make, Yooka-Laylee is filled with all types of collectibles. Pagies are googly-eyed scraps of magic books that let you unlock and enter different game worlds. Quills are feathers that are scattered around each world, to the tune of 200 per. There are sometimes scraps of pagies that you have to scavenger hunt for, putting them together to form a full pagie.

There's a story, but it's so barely-there there's no reason to pay attention to it. Characters make constant grunts and warbles as their dialogue s l o w l y rolls across the screen, and it's so annoying that I soon wanted to mash my way through dialogue as quickly as possible. This is the real story: you control a chameleon, and a bat, and you're going to collect a bunch of shit.

While you're collecting things, little monsters charge at you with toothy grins. They're cute but not interesting to fight, and easily ignored. Combat is as simple as pressing a button to do a Mario-style spin attack into enemies. One bit I love, though: after you've killed a few, the survivors will sometimes throw their hands in the air and run away.

I definitely haven't seen this many puns or googly eyes in a game since Banjo Kazooie, and they're very nice and very silly but never quite have the freshness to be genuinely funny. Trowzer is a snake who sells you new skills. Trouser snake, get it? Ha!

Yooka-Laylee settles into this playful silliness, never really making me laugh, but at least making me grin a little bit as I run into new characters, like Sir Scofffsalot and the Knights of Hamalot. "I bet you have a weight-related name," jokes Laylee. Does admitting you're about to tell an obvious joke make it funnier? Rare's trademark meta jokes are still here, too, with one early line about how they blew the Kickstarter money on boss fights. 

The more nostalgic you are for old Rare games, the more you'll enjoy these jokes and the general atmosphere of Yooka-Laylee. I'm happier about the big picture than the specifics: Mascot platformers are good for the heart, and Yooka-Laylee does well with its fundamentals. Jumping and moving feel good off the bat, and you're quickly given the ability to smack enemies with a Mario-style spin attack and to curl into a ball for a high-speed roll that can get you up hills.

Navigating the world feels nice enough because the basic character movement is responsive and expressively animated and the camera (controlled with the right stick on a gamepad) stays out of your way. 

But the world also feels a bit, well, basic, at least in the first two worlds I dipped into. There are fun characters to run into (there's a race-an-NPC minigame, Rare fans will be happy to know), a few scatterings of basic enemies. Light platforming challenges dotted around the world. Simple puzzles. But when I think back to playing Mario Galaxy, I remember a sublime joy in getting from one place to another with Mario's acrobatic moveset. Long jumping across dangerous gaps. Triple jumping just to feel the satisfaction of that press-press-press button rhythm. Wall jumping instead of riding an easier platform. I miss that stuff here.

Mario's moves gave emptier spaces reason to exist, because I could make my own fun in them. Without that acrobatic moveset—at least at the start—bouncing around in Yooka-Laylee is a milder pleasure. It doesn't excel.

After buying a few abilities from Trowzer, I started to get a taste for how a more complex moveset could make Yooka-Laylee's environments more interesting. I picked up an ability that let Laylee emit a sonic screech, which reveals some invisible platforms and momentarily stuns enemies. In the second world, Glitterglaze Glacier, I grabbed a skill that let Yooka absorb the properties of certain objects in the environment, which changes her body. Honey makes you sticky and able to climb slippery slopes. Bowling balls make you heavy and let you barrel through enemies while rolling along. 

I hope later worlds throw more platforming challenges at you that require a combination of these skills, along with jumping and rolling, to get from place to place. In Glitterglaze Glacier and Tribalstack Tropics, I only used them in brief bursts to grab Pagies. Hopefully later worlds also diverge from the basic jungle/ice/lava template we've seen in so many platformers. And maybe Yooka's full arsenal of chameleon powers and abilities purchased from Trowzer make for a huge, exciting moveset that need to be combined in interesting ways. It's certainly a possibility—in addition to unlocking new worlds, pagies also expand worlds, adding new areas and things to find within them. That could make all the difference.

I hope all that's the case, because Yooka-Laylee's first two hours are just a bit too familiar: mildly fun, like visiting your old stomping ground, and the new decor is a nice touch. You'll have a fine time, but you'll mostly spend that time reminiscing about all those past visits. 

We've been having a think about all the fine indie titles coming to the PC Gamer Weekender—there’s so many great ones, it’s hard to decide just which should get most of your playing time. Or which two, or three.

As such we're happy to present you with 10 (ten) indie titles being shown off at the PC Gamer Weekender that we can’t wait to get our hands on.

Dead Cells

We doubt we’ll be making much progress on Dead Cells—it being a Metroidvania-style game with Dark Souls-inspired combat—but it’s sure to have our number from the second we get to playing. But that doesn’t stop us from wanting to try, at least a bit, because we know we're going to need the practice before this one comes out.

Loot Rascals 

It’s hard to even describe what you do on Loot Rascals—a card-based, turn-based, co-operative but also not game of survival and escape. Does that work? we're not sure. Either way, after playing it a bit more at the Weekender we'll be sure to jot down some notes so we can come back to you with a more in-depth description than ‘it’s really very good fun’.

Mirage: Arcane Warfare 

Chivalry: Medieval Warfare hit all the right notes with its crunching combat and defined sense of place—but there was always one thing missing for us: magic. Guess what Mirage: Arcane Warfare has in it? Swords! Oh yes, also magic. This looks like something of a dark horse.

Fantastic Contraption (Vive) 

Admission time: collectively, we're pretty terrible at building things, and they are only ever called ‘fantastic’ in a sarcastic fashion. But the joy about Fantastic Contraption is that if you make something rubbish, you just start again—or keep building on it until you’ve made something that does… something. Add on top of this the fact you’re in the best VR headset money can buy, the Vive, and you’re onto a winner.

Raw Data (Vive) 

While Raw Data looks brilliant and we want to play its VR shooter goodness for that reason, there’s also another key reason we'll be heading its way at the Weekender: there’ll be a proper space set up for the Vive so you can actually move around and experience the headset how you’re supposed to. We cannot—that is, cannot—do that in our tiny box-rooms at home.

Yooka-Laylee 

The spiritual successor to Banjo Kazooie was a Kickstarter success (and record breaker), and it’s easy to see why. We're just as eager as all those crowdfunder-ers to get some time with this classic-looking cutesy platformer.

Antihero 

There’s not so much fun in being the hero these days, so why not be the bad guy instead and run your own crime empire in a turn-based strategy game? Why not indeed. Best of all, Antihero contains hilarious Mockney-Londonish names, with liberal use of words like ‘bum’. Bliss.

King Under the Mountain 

A bit of a change of pace it might be, but King Under the Mountain offers the kind of quirky strategy you only really get from small (or one-person) studios. As such it has to go on our to-play list.

Caromble! 

Presented as ‘a fresh take on the brick-breaker genre’, Caromble! Is… a fresh take on the brick-breaker genre. It’s as creative as it is exciting, and is definitely worth a look.

Nature’s Zombie Apocalypse 

Bears. Bears with miniguns. Bears with miniguns fighting a zombie horde. Need we say more?

All 10 of these games will be joined by many more speakers, games and booths, all at the PC Gamer Weekender, which is being held February 18-19 at the Olympia, London, in the UK. For more details see the site, and follow us on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news. Tickets are available now from £12.99.