The old-school collectathon comes back, with all the nostalgia and all the grit in the gears that implies.

On gut feeling, no criterion, Yooka-Laylee lands just under the middle, ahead of 44% of games. The details draw a fairly clean fault line. What holds up is the feel and the look: the controller passes 59% of titles, the art style 55%, the soundtrack sits around average. What gives way is everything else. Attachment leaves it ahead of barely 17% of games, and the wish to rediscover it for the first time drops even lower, past just 8%. The desert island follows the same slope. There is the tension: people enjoy playing it, but almost nobody wants to live it again.

Against the 3D platformers it openly set out to revive, it collides with the weight of its models. The worlds are there, the collectibles are there, but the emotion and the memory stayed on the other side.

So, who is it for? For you if you like combing a level end to end, unlocking moves, and finding a rhythm the genre has largely dropped. Much less so if you expect it to leave a mark, or to survive comparison with the classics it keeps invoking.