Toki Tori 2 (2013)

I've been in a pretty big lull lately, games just aren't doing it for me after the excitement of Dying Light 2. Typically when this happens, I take a break from gaming and ease back into it with something lighter.

I managed to grab Toki Tori 2+ on a $2 sale (and luckily I had $2.50 in eShop balance) so it was free - and I've been getting so much enjoyment out of this game. It's an "open world" puzzle platformer, and it's pretty darn tricky at times, but the solution always hits you like "doh! why didn't I think of that?" and not "come on, HOW could I have possibly thought of that!?"

Where it shines is in it's simplicity, however. Your only controls are to move, stomp, and whistle. You learn through example how to use the environment to get to the next checkpoint, and despite not being any form of help or tutorial whatsoever, somehow you always figure out what it is you should be doing.

I highly recommend Toki Tori 2+ if you're looking to take it down a notch and enjoy some calm puzzle platforming. Terrible game.

Tried this game after it was mentioned on "game-maker's toolkit" and wasn't disappointed. This is definitely a top-notch puzzle game. I spent a lot longer than I'd like to admit to figure out some of the more challenging sections.

I really appreciate how carefully crafted each section is. There's rarely multiple ways to beat a given puzzle, they take a good bit of planning ahead, being carefully observant.

Toki Tori 2+ is one of the best little puzzle platformers I've ever played. It's got one of those qualities that I really enjoyed about The Witness, that it's a lock-and-key inventory system where all the keys are in your head. My wife and I played it together from beginning to end, trading the controller back-and-forth; but, since playing the game is so observational in the first place, for the most part it felt like we were both just playing simultaneously.

The game is also made of cute, which was precisely the mood we were apparently in. The player character is a dumpy little flightless bird, which is funny enough in itself; but we had multiple laugh-out-loud moments, provoked equally by wonderful art and animation as by surprising but obvious-in-retrospect combinations of the game's rules.

And the game's rules are everything. The player has two primary verbs: tweet and stomp. You learn a few songs that you can tweet in a morse-code sequence of long/short tweets, but these serve as simple interface abstractions. Everything about the game is observing the behavior of the other creatures in the world and their reactions to you as you move about the world, tweet, and stomp. The complexity of the interactions ramp up slowly enough that we never lost track of things we could do: solving a puzzle was always a matter of realization and inspiration; never memory.

And above all: we never felt stuck through an entire session. No matter how stuck we might have felt at the end of one session, each time we picked the game back up we were able to clear the obstacle and make progress.

Since the game has barely any text, even the names "tweet" and "stomp", the names of all of the creatures, and especially the names of the interactions and rules, are emergent: the short-hand vocabulary we assigned in our conversation. The game prescribes essentially nothing.

I would recommend this game to literally anyone. It's wonderful. It's smart. It's just about perfect length. And, again, it's made of cute. What's not to love?