I played this game so I could run around as a cute elephant. That's it, that's the entire reason.

Yono and the Celestial Elephants is a cutesy action-adventurey game in which you play as Yono, a Celestial Elephant. Elephants in this world are no ordinary creatures; they're mystical beings born to the world only once every thousand years in order to watch over humans, guide them, and bring peace and harmony when it is most needed. As Yono goes through the realm, he hears tales of elephants who came before and the incredible deeds they performed which have become a part of their mythology. The people he meets treat him with a kind of reverence, but they're also happy to ask him to do little chores like watering their plants with his Celestial Trunk.

In your travels, you discover that, as always seems to be the case, The Humans Are Being Shitty Again. The human kingdom, centered in the town of Knightingale, maintains an unjust, unhappy peace with the town of Freehaven, which is the settlement founded by the Mekani, a race of machines who became sentient and formed their own democratic society. The humans mistrust and dislike the Mekani, keeping them in line through military might and forcing highly unfavorable trade agreements upon them so that the Mekani can never gain economic independence.

The shifts in tone here can be a little funny. You talk to one character and they just say something simple and kid-like, and then you turn around and talk to some other character and they give you this long and complex dialogue about politics and exploitation of labor. It's like the game was made by a first-year college student who wanted make an innocent kids' game, but also really wanted to tell the world about oppression or something.

The gameplay is primarily puzzles (quite simple mostly, but with some better ones later) with a bit of combat here and there, but to call the combat simplistic would be generous. Outside of boss fights, literally every enemy in the game can be beaten simply by standing in place, waiting for the enemy to walk up to you, and then hitting the button that makes you charge forward and smash into them, and repeat. The boss fights add some puzzley elements so they're slightly more interesting.. slightly.

The game is pleasant enough but I just didn't get the sense of heart or uniqueness that I find in better indie games, such as Carto. The characters in that game felt sincere, and the game itself felt memorable. Yono and the Celestial Elephants by comparison feels like something that I probably won't remember much about afterward.

I did get to be a cute elephant, though, and I don't know of too many other games that have that.