Whatever else it is, Yooka-Laylee is one gigantic joke at its own expense. The game's surprisingly beefy script seemingly can't go a moment without poking fun at itself and video game foibles at large - everything from the level design's love of bobbing collectibles through optical drive loading times to how much cash developer Playtonic blew on the boss battles.
Many of these in-jokes are distinctly contemporary - there are a couple of gags about crowdfunding that may not entirely amuse the project's Kickstarter backers - but the majority take aim at the golden age of early 3D platforming, before the first-person shooter became the console industry's flagship genre. The game's grand yet dinkily styled, themepark environments teem with retro parodies, all of whom express themselves in authentically inane, pre-CD-ROM gibberish. Among other dramatis personae, you'll tangle with a gibbering, low-res arcade mascot who presides over clumps of coin-op mini-games, a stony goliath perched atop a series of ramps, like the Whomp King in Super Mario 64, and a jovial minecart who pines for the days when hurtling along a rail was a charming novelty rather than the hoariest of cliches.
As is often the case with this kind of humour, the self-awareness is by turns infectious and grating - jokes about unskippable dialogue and quality assurance are only so funny when they occur in a game that does, in fact, feature the odd wodge of unskippable dialogue and a rather unwieldy camera. The aggressively ironic tone also betrays a certain insecurity about whether the type of game Yooka-Laylee aims to be still merits attention, a commitment to making light of the whole enterprise lest it prove surplus to requirements. After 15 or so hours with the game I can answer that yes, there's still call for a platformer of this hue today, but Playtonic's devotion to the classics does feel like more of a check than an advantage in places, and the execution is a little too uneven for comfort.
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