Recent reviews by VBarata

Toki Tori 2+ is one of the best puzzle games I have ever played. I wouldn't call it "metroidvania-style" because this is not the target audience for this game. It is a game for people that like puzzles, plain and simple. And, as a puzzle game, it is exquisitely designed and a real joy to play, with beautiful graphics, delightful music and sounds, and of course, masterfully crafted puzzles that naturally escalate in difficulty as you learn to use your seemingly limited abilities to interact with various creatures and control the environment in increasingly more complex - and often surprising - ways. Note that, as with any good puzzle game, there will be parts that will make you scratch your head for several minutes before finding the solution required to progress further. And the most difficult parts do require thinking completely out-of-the-box and/or performing tasks with tricky execution. On the other hand, I never felt hopelessly stuck in any puzzle, and by the time you reach the hardest ones, you will have the option of quickly and easily switching to a different exploration path to clear your head.

About the character abilities being only "whistle" and "stomp", I like to see it differently: our actual abilities are the sum of everything that each creature we encounter can do. We control those creatures indirectly through our basic whistle and stomp actions, and these actions have different effects depending on not just the creature itself, but also what it is doing at the time, and with what other creatures or environment features it is currently interacting with. This makes for a very rich set of things that should be considered when reasoning about the puzzles, and this set grows as you learn more about the behavior and interactions of the creatures.

What I personally found a little frustrating about the game was that I noticed quite early on that there were alternate paths that could be taken - if only I could solve a much harder puzzle than the obvious one in front of me. And the prospect of missing something important led me to spend too much time on certain puzzles that I was only expected to tackle later on, after acquiring much more knowledge about the game mechanics. To make it worse, when I finally got to solve one such puzzle, I was taken to a part of the game that I had no chance at figuring out so soon, which made me feel quite lost and drop the game for a while. When I decided to pick it up again, I started over and played in a more relaxed way, without worrying about the alternate paths at first to see where that led me. That ended up in a very natural and satisfying progression through the game, specially when I finally discovered how I would be able to backtrack and try new things on previously visited areas without spending time on previously-solved puzzles. Because of that, I would like to give new players some recommendations:

- At first, don't worry about thinking out-of-the-box because of the openness of the world that everyone keeps talking about. At all. Just progress through the game following the most obvious path while you learn how the world works.

- If you need a sense of individual standalone "levels" to beat one-by-one (so that the game feels more like the first Toki Tori) , consider that each checkpoint (golden statue) you reach is a level beaten.

- There will be a moment in the game when you realize - very clearly - that you have been given a more tangible objective and a much greater freedom to explore without fears of getting stuck or missing something. This happens at the same time as you are starting to feel that the knowledge you have been gathering about the game will actually allow you to try new things and access new areas. This moment feels almost like a revelation, and once you reach it, you will probably keep glued to the game until you finish it.

- As you explore the open world from this point on, you will keep learning new things and using them to your advantage. And you will be given clues about the purpose of those little spinning collectibles as well. And, like me, you will probably become a huge fan of this awesome puzzle game.