One Hell Of A Yarn
This week, I reviewed Yoshi’s Woolly World, a game that sees Nintendo combining the egg-throwing action of Yoshi’s Island with the crafty look of Kirby’s Epic Yarn. I mentioned that Woolly World takes the aesthetic to a new extreme, with tons of cute and clever touches. Knitting novice that I am, though, I failed to notice some of the even finer details Venerable Monk listed down in the comments:
I’m completely charmed by the aesthetic of this game. I thought Kirby’s Epic Yarn had topped out what you could do with craft-based video game art, but I was wrong!
The little details are what really brings it home. Where Kirby’s Epic Yarn mostly employed your typical stockinette stitch or a colored fabric with thread for the stitching, Yoshi’s Woolly World is employing all kinds of patterns to create their landscape and items: Yoshi himself is crocheted; the tree trunks alternate knit and purl stitches to bring out the texture of the bark; unraveled enemies turn into balls of yarn, which is how you would collect it when you tear out a botched scarf or whatever; and the hidden yarn items are happy little skeins, just like you would buy at the store! I can’t wait to see if they have some sort of cable-knit level!
And taking a closer look at some of the textures, I’m really appreciating that they added some mistakes and uneven stitches to the environments. Unless you’re a master knitter (or super neurotic about it) there’s going to be at least one dropped stitch in a big project, and it takes tons of practice before you can work with consistent tension on the yarn over a large area. They could have taken the easy route and used a simple repeated texture for each object, but by adding imperfections to the set pieces, they’ve imbued the world with a handmade feel on an almost subconscious level.
As I saw it, the third stitch holding Woolly World together was the level design philosophy of Mario Galaxy and 3D World, focusing on discrete, diverse stages. It’s an approach we’ve heard a lot of praise for around these parts, so it was refreshing to hear a couple of commenters come at it from a different angle. Ben was the first to break the ice:
I loathe this design philosophy. The levels are so short and quick and easy, and it feels like the concepts they introduce never get a chance to really breathe. Since they are only used once, you never get to see them taken to the logical places they could go because their forgotten by the next level.
3D World seems like such a huge step back from Mario 64 and Sunshine. The worlds in 3D World felt like they’d been cut from a small bit of an actual full level from the previous games, like if instead of the full first level of Mario 64, you just cut out that mountain where you dodge the boulders while climbing and presented it as its own stage.