Yerba Buena

Yerba Buena comes from the Berlin-based indie developer Mad About Pandas and is a surreal first-person puzzle-platformer set in a bug-ridden computer game. You take on the role of Barbara, also known simply as Barb, who lives her life as an NPC in a computer game that is no longer being updated, which means that the bugs and glitches in the game aren't being fixed and are starting to pop up all over the cityscape.

The game is set in 1970s San Francisco and Barb and her friends are fighting to prevent the city's famous Yerba Buena Park from being replaced, as planned, by a huge office block. However, Barb and her friends suddenly find themselves caught up in a grim case involving kidnapping and a local biker gang, and from there things start to pick up pace.

Since Barb lives in a computer game, she experiences strange glitches and bugs along the way, and these are quite amusing for gaming geeks like us. I won't reveal them here, but I can say that she comes across a bloke called Tee, who hasn't moved all week as he's stuck in a classic T-pose. She also comes across developer logs from Arne at Pyramid Interactive, who once worked on the game Barb lives in, and here you hear him talking about the bugs the game has and whether they should be fixed at all. This whole setup, with the game taking place inside another computer game, is quite amusing, but unfortunately is never really staged effectively.

On the other hand, the game's biggest gimmick is the "Oscillator", which Barb finds at the start of the game. It's a weapon-like contraption that can manipulate the surroundings by copying movements and/or physical properties from other parts of the environment. It works by allowing you to copy a movement or a physical property from selected areas of the environment and apply them to other selected objects around you. The movements could be a spinning carousel at the town fairground or a mechanical advertising sign where a logo moves up and down.

So how can this be used? A good example is that, at the start of the game, you need to move a parked car to the other side of the street so that you can use it to climb onto the roof of a small building. Therefore, with the Oscillator, you can copy the movement of other cars at the end of the street, which are driving from right to left, and then copy this movement to the parked car so that it moves in the same direction, i.e. from the right-hand side of the street to the left-hand side of the street. You can influence many other things - indeed, entire sections of houses and buildings - with movements from lifts, propellers in ventilation systems, and many other things.

Later, the Oscillator gains several new abilities; for example, you can make things vanish into thin air by copying the properties of steam from a vent or from a coffee machine in an office and applying them to a building, which then dissolves into thin air, just as the steam does. You can also later apply the properties of a bouncy castle or trampoline, allowing you to jump high by stepping on selected objects that have been imbued with this property.

On paper, this sounds quite exciting, but that's not quite how it is in reality. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what's wrong here, but there's something that feels "off" when playing Yerba Buena. At times, it seems as though the puzzles don't quite work as they should, but this can be difficult to discern, as several puzzles can be quite difficult to understand. Even if you do what seems obviously right, it's as if certain puzzles simply don't work or are just very restrictive, so the solution has to be executed in exactly the right way, and it's not always clear what the game wants you to do.

Puzzles are allowed to be difficult, but they must be difficult for the right reason. In Yerba Buena, they often feel frustrating for the reasons mentioned above, and add to that the first-person perspective, which does the game no favours, and clunky physics, particularly in the more complicated puzzles later in the game, where several of the Oscillator's properties must be combined.

The game encourages you to explore and experiment your way to the solution of the various puzzles, and so you aren't penalised when you die, which is lovely. Nevertheless, it's frustrating when you have figured out the solution but simply cannot execute it due to imprecise controls, clunky physics, restrictive puzzles, and a first-person view that can get in the way of seeing what you need to. Consequently, some of the game's puzzles end up being more frustrating than they were interesting to solve and that really shouldn't be the case in a puzzle game.

The visuals in Yerba Buena are fairly simple, but they work. Things can get quite chaotic when you use the oscillator to move large sections of various buildings around, but the game engine can handle it. The animations of the game's characters and objects in the environment are very mechanical and stiff, giving the game a slightly rough appearance; overall, Yerba Buena has a somewhat clunky feel to it, and it seems as though the developers may have bitten off more than they could chew.

Yerba Buena is based on a fun idea, but unfortunately it simply isn't very fun to play. As mentioned earlier, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what's wrong, but the whole thing just feels a bit "off" and the game never quite clicks. The various puzzles can seem illogical, the controls and mechanics can get in the way of solving them, and the game has a slightly stiff and mechanical feel to it.

I wouldn't in any way advise against Yerba Buena, and if you're a puzzle fan and fancy trying a different kind of puzzle game, then by all means give this one a go, but be prepared to get frustrated by some occasionally illogical puzzles, some clunky mechanics, and a first-person view that makes the whole thing a bit more fiddly than it ought to be.

Yerba Buena is a decent little puzzle game with a good basic concept, which unfortunately doesn't quite take off, and it all ends up feeling more like hard work than entertainment and that's a shame. And the reasonable price tag of just under £21 can't change that.