Yerba Buena Review - A Bag of Schwag

Barely Magic Mike
1 day ago
7 min read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt_kcC_0YpM

In an era full of Metroidvanias, Vampire Survivors clones and shooters content to be more or less carbon copies of one another, the puzzle genre continues to impress me year after year. Puzzle games may not be exceptionally popular unless their names start with P and end with “ortal”, but the sheer volume of innovative, interesting ideas on display in ones like Can of Wormholes, Spooky Express and Strange Jigsaws justified far more sales than they’ve gotten.

Sadly, for some cases, innovative ideas alone do not make a great puzzle game. Executing on them with challenges that scale up in difficulty while making the game's internal logic intuitive to the player is paramount to having a good time. So does Yerba Buena, a narrative-focused puzzle platformer that challenges you to literally copy-paste the movement of its environmental objects, stick the landing?

Most puzzle games use a unique core mechanic to lay the foundation of their design, and for Yerba Buena this is a gun called the Oscillator. Scanning the movement of an object, be it a car driving by, spinning ceiling fan or bouncy trampoline, the Oscillator can then imprint that same property onto another object. Scan a car moving east and you can make chunks of entire buildings move in the same direction with the click of a button. In theory, it sounds like an awesome creative playground for open-ended problem solving. In execution, its mechanics are so restrictive, janky and poorly designed that my enthusiasm got wiped out harder than Santa bellyflopping off a high dive.

There's no joy in having to be brutally honest about an indie game created with something resembling love, but my duty as a reviewer is to give you information that helps you spend your presumably limited gaming budget wisely, so it's necessary for me to say that virtually every element of Yerba Buena’s gameplay and story feels held together by scotch tape and chewing gum.

First off, the scanning mechanics. Actual scannable objects can be revealed with a pull of the left trigger, and you'll note that there simply aren't very many, and the game really likes to pick and choose which ones are allowed and which aren't. Your aiming reticle will highlight orange when a moving object's property can be copied, and blue when it can be pasted, which is generally only allowed on environmental objects that are “glitching”, which is a story thing… We'll get to it.

Limiting the player's abilities to use this scanner on anything and everything is, from a game design perspective, not only practical but pretty much necessary. That's not one of the issues here. Rather, it's that the scanning is so restrictive that most puzzles feel like your only options are to do exactly what the developers intended or kindly go fuck yourself. This is especially apparent in puzzles where the exact movement you need is sneakily hidden somewhere not so obvious in the environment, turning what should be a logic-focused puzzler into a hidden object headache. I recommend using the left trigger a lot.

Even when successfully finding which object you need to scan, though, doing so is needlessly frustrating, especially if playing with a controller, since many objects can only be scanned in particular spots like…. a ferris wheel that only lets you scan in between each carriage of it? Sure, why not. There are also several situations where you have to apply a specific property to multiple objects, but for some reason your Oscillator refuses to remember the last thing you scanned to allow multiple copies of that movement - rather, every single time you fire it, you must go back to the source of the original movement and scan again. Hey, at least I'm getting my steps in, right? Kind of?

You'd think the restrictive nature of the game's mechanics would at least be in service of tight, carefully curated level design, but on this point, you'd also be sadly mistaken. Yerba Buena, while describing itself on Steam as a “puzzle-platforming adventure”, is overwhelmingly a puzzle game that occasionally requires some jumping around. The platforming aspect doesn't go much further than the jump button simply existing and occasionally making you use it, and the only time it dares to be challenging on that front is when it's not intending to be, like when you try to jump on a bouncy object that flings you backward instead of up because your jump was a few inches shy of perfectly placed. Annoying.

The puzzle design itself isn't necessarily terrible, but often problematic. A good puzzle game prides itself on a steadily escalating complexity curve, allowing you time to acclimate to its mechanics while throwing new twists in to check your understanding. Many of Yerba Buena's puzzles, however, show very little evolution from one another, often being solvable in the same way over and over for long stretches of time. Then there are the trickier ones that might require you to, for example, manipulate your way up the inside of a massive pachinko machine or time-limited ones taking place during a car chase.

The pachinko machine was logical enough, but such an annoying chore when it required some experimentation and scanning the free fall amusement park ride I needed, felt like trying to chase my dog to get a dead bird out of her mouth. That car chase, though, was especially sloppy, presenting itself as a fast-paced scripted sequence that doesn’t work at all for a slow-paced puzzle solving game. At various points throughout it, I had to look through my environment to find the exact object necessary to pave a path forward, and the way each of these stops awkwardly shattered the momentum felt borderline laughable. My favorite part was at the very end where you have to copy the movement of this sort of jack-in-the-box style punching arm that’s randomly mounted to the side of a building in order to move a dumpster over. Even by my relatively low standards for how contrived a game is allowed to be, this felt absolutely ridiculous. Some of the game’s puzzles also felt buggy or blatantly unfinished, with seemingly scannable objects unable to be scanned, a part of one particular level that looked like an early Unity demo, and one uniquely annoying case where I got stuck in an infinite death loop and had to reload a checkpoint.

Sadly, I haven't yet gotten to my least favorite part yet, which is easily the game's story. “But Mike,” you may ask. “I don't need a good story in a puzzle game. Who cares if it's bad?” To which I respond - I fully agree with you. I don't need my puzzle games to have a good story. But if a puzzle game is going to aggressively force its story down my throat, it could buy me dinner first.

The game takes place in a 1970s version of San Francisco, established early on as a literal game in which Barb and her friends are NPCs who must save the city from a greedy tech corporation and the various irksome “glitches” that have been appearing all over the place. Its premise could've shown promise, but as early as the opening 10 minutes manages to crater all expectations.

The game's opening is a gauntlet of real-time cutscenes taking place mostly in a cab where Barb is having a poorly written and dreadfully voiced exposition dump of a conversation with her friend and cab driver, Russell. This seemingly interminable sequence is one of many in Yerba Buena where you'll be stuck in one position while listening to a character talk and occasionally observe different objects in the environment that Barb will proceed to comment on. You can at least skip through lines of dialogue, but these gameplay interruptions show up so frequently and are of such poor quality that the lack of self-awareness around them is borderline shocking. Barb’s story isn't the least bit compelling and frequently makes little sense, and is not helped one bit by character animations that look like they were inspired by Chuck E Cheese animatronics. The plot even actively hurts the gameplay outside of cutscenes, since I can’t count how many times I had to wait for lines of dialogue to end before I could interact with an object.

Even outside of cutscenes, most of Yerba Buena's visuals fare no better than this. The art direction and environmental design reek of “minimum viable product” energy, full of many generic, half-finished looking buildings and special effects that look terrible, like an early-game police shootout that literally looks like they’re just flinging orange and yellow pixels at one another. And while the game's actual NPCs don't impact the gameplay, they are also absolute morons, frequently walking into walls and staring blankly at you like blind pigeons aimlessly searching for crumbs of bread. To the game's credit though, despite some annoying stuttering here and there, it runs pretty well on the Steam Deck.

Sound design frequently lacks as well, with music being bland and forgettable if it even exists at all. Some of the carnival music in the amusement park levels would play in such short, irritating loops that I was incentivized to solve puzzles faster to avoid an inner ear bleed, and the voice acting ranges from barely passable to utterly dreadful, feeling like a student project at best and not the work of an indie team backed by a AA publisher.

In the end, Yerba Buena is far from the worst game I’ve ever reviewed, but if you’ve ever checked out my thoughts on The Redress of Mira or Death Noodle Delivery, you’ll know that bar is low. I can't say there's a single aspect of Yerba Buena that I liked beyond core ideas that it struggles at every single turn to execute. It's hard to even give it credit for the small handful of puzzles that don't kind of suck, because a baffling lack of quality-of-life features make the few mildly clever challenges a total drag. Even hardcore fans of first-person puzzlers may struggle to find redeeming qualities in this one. Yerba Buena is a mess - I can’t recommend it to anyone.

Indie Krampus/TERRIBLE