Recent reviews by Jem

Toki Tori 2 is, rather obviously, the sequel to Toki Tori. It's evolved from being a pure puzzle game, with limited use of items, to a more fluid platformer puzzle. While the original was pretty unforgiving, and often required surgically precise steps to solving the puzzles, TT2 isn't quite as strict. Most puzzles can be re-attempted without a reset or winding back time.

In TT2, you return as Toki Tori, and you only have two (unlimited) abilities at your disposal : a whistle, and a ground stomp. There are many other creatures and elements in the game, and they will respond to one, oftentimes both, of these actions. Puzzles are solved by using your abiltiies to manipulate your surroundings. It sounds very simple, but there are many, many different creatures in the game, and the trickier puzzles will require chaining their reactions together. The 'core' puzzles that you need to solve to progress through the game are fairly straightforward, but the side area ones are much tougher, and it always feels very satisfying to finally solve them and hear the bonus area background chime.

There are several good points to this game that I want to highlight.

1) It doesn't try to babysit you. The game provides subtle hints to guide you along, but it lets you learn it without butting in obstrusively. The game itself starts off without any kind of narration, and you're left to make your way through the levels. In fact, the only help text I ever remembered seeing, was the hint to sing the Reset song, and even that only appears after you fail to follow the non textual clue. The effect of this is that it increases the immersion of the game, and makes solving the levels so much more rewarding.

2) No need to constantly run to an ingame menu. Instead, Toki Tori can whistle a certain combination of notes to perform certain actions (e.g. reset to last checkpoint or go to the world map). It's a very nice touch.

3) You don't get any new abilities as you progress (with the exception of the songs, but those don't factor into the puzzzles). This means there's no grinding involved. All puzzles are solvable right from the beginning of the game, but on your first try you won't know how. You'll learn several tips and tricks as you go along, and when you backtrack to the earlier to fulfill your masochistic desire to collect all the score items, it will suddenly strike you that you can get one frog to float another frog up.

4) Graphics and music. The art style is very minimalistic, clean and ridiculously cute, and the music fits the game very well. For the most part, it's a relaxing experience, in spite of all the puzzle solving.

As with most platformers, it plays much better with a controller.

Highly recommended.