Toki Tori 2+ PC Review

By – Armaan Khan

Watching a video of Toki Tori 2+, you wouldn’t expect it to be a masterclass in excellent game design, because it looks like yet another puzzle platformer with a cute protagonist.  Similarly, if you’re familiar with the first Toki Tori game, which was just a collection of disconnected puzzles, you wouldn’t expect much more from the sequel.  You’d be wrong on both counts because in reality, Toki Tori 2+ is an almost perfectly-designed puzzle adventure, and one that shouldn’t be missed.

Toki Tori 2+ follows the adventure of a flightless yellow bird (whom I’ll refer to as Toki form now on, because she doesn’t have a name) as it tries to… well, I’m not sure exactly what Toki is trying to do. There’s no opening cutscene to provide context when you first start the game.  In fact, there’s not even a main menu.  It just goes right into the action, with Toki waiting patiently for your input.  This is the first lesson every game designer should learn: start the game as quickly as possible.   As you play, however, you’ll stumble across the game’s premise: the land is being consumed by a strange black goo, and Toki must  find five ancient frogs to stop it.

Aside from walking and climbing ladders, Toki has only two abilities: singing and stomping.  They are available from the start, and she doesn’t learn anything new as the game progresses.  Instead, Two Tribes present new and interesting ways to challenge your use of these two skills, which is Lesson #2 aspiring and experienced game designers should learn.

Okay, to be fair, Toki can learn five songs along the way, but those are solely for player convenience and not otherwise useful.  For example, one song is used to activate the fast travel system, and another causes Toki to self-destruct in case you find yourself trapped/stuck, which reloads the game to the last checkpoint you passed.  What’s more, you don’t have to wait until Toki learns the songs to use them.  If you start a new game and tweet out a tune, it’ll work right away.

The gameplay and puzzles focus on navigating the environment.  Toki can’t climb over anything taller than her waist, so she needs to use her tweets and stomps to manipulate the creatures around her in order to get past obstacles.  Different creatures react differently to Toki’s actions, and the only way to learn these reactions is to experiment.  This is where Lesson #3 lies: the game doesn’t tutorialize or otherwise teach you how to play; you have to figure things out on your own.  So, for example, you’ll come across what looks like a stone that’s too high to climb over. If you tweet, the stone—which turns out to be a hermit crab—will react in one way.  If you stomp, it’ll react differently.  Using this knowledge, you can then shift the stone into a position that lets you move past it and continue on your way.  Thus, you’ve learned how to manipulate this one creature, which will come in handy throughout the game.

As more animals are added to the mix, you’ll learn through trial and error how to take advantage of them by either tweeting or stomping, and how to make them work together.  Normally trial and error is a bad thing, but Toki Tori makes it bearable thanks to some smart checkpointing and even smarter puzzle design.  There are no red herrings here.  If you see a creature hanging around, that means it has a use.  You just need to figure out what that use is.  The difficulty builds gradually as well, so by the time you get to the really complex stuff, you’ll have enough knowledge to work from and solve the puzzle.

Well, that is, unless you accidentally bypass the easier bits, which I did at first.  This is Lesson #4, for those still keeping count.  Toki Tori 2+ adopts the Metroidvania mold for its structure.  You’re dropped in a huge world with freedom to travel in multiple directions and no indication as to which one is “correct. ” The game isn’t afraid to let you make a mistake—because, thankfully, making mistakes isn’t punished—and you’re just left to explore. If you get stuck, the ability exists to easily backtrack and investigate somewhere else.  Chances are, you’ll learn something new, which you can apply to where you were stuck before.  “Aha!” moments like that are peppered throughout game, as you organically figure out how to solve puzzles by using creatures in new ways.

All this is wrapped around a colorful art style and cheerful music that is a nice departure from the medium earth tones and martial beats that tend to permeate the game industry.  Toki Tori 2+ is an upbeat game that never failed to bring a smile to my face.  The only negative I can see is the controls. They’re simple enough: cursors or WASD moves, Z or spacebar tweets, X or Enter stomps.  The problem, however, is that you can’t rebind them. That’s not something I personally had a problem with, but it will probably make some die-hard PC fans super angry.  Also, performance on a Mac is a little bit worse than on Windows.  To get consistently smooth performance, I had to set my resolution to 1280×720, which made me a little bit sad, because it ran perfectly at 2560×1440 under Windows using the exact same hardware.

Is It Worth Your Money?

If I had to pick a Game of the Year right now, it would hands down be Toki Tori 2+.  I never expected, ever, to have an experience like I did with it. The game is brilliant, exceptional, unique, and definitely worth the $15 dollars it’ll cost you.  Heck, I’d go so far as to say this game is worth twice that, so you’re actually getting a bargain. Don’t hesitate to pick it up.