YesterMorrow is a metroidvania with pixel graphics. You play as Yui, the daughter of the forest land’s timekeeper. They are people of light, protecting the people from the darkness. Well one day shit goes down and you’re told to go get the grand master, and you fall in a hole. The best stories start with people being slaughtered and the main character falling in a hole. When you wake up your dad’s gone, and time skips forward a few years. You’re now at least a teen maybe an adult, I’m not really sure. The whole world is in bad shape as the darkness has won, most of your village is destroyed, most of the people have been taken away, with more getting taken every now and then. Well you meet with the forest guardian and gain the ability to use time shrines to go back and forward in time. You go back in time to before the attack on the village happened, and then back to the current time where everything is destroyed. Now you have to figure out how to stop the attack with the knowledge and abilities of the future.

The combat is fairly easy, at first you can’t fight anything because all the critters of the land have been infected with darkness like some sort of fucking parasite. You have to gain timekeeper abilities in order to force the darkness out of the animals and then to use it again on the darkness to kill it. Pretty much every ability you gain, which is a slow steady drip, gives you the ability to do so. You start with the wall jump and dodge abilities, then you get a bomb that explodes on contact with darkness or on a timer when not touching the darkness. An ability to create a light orb to attract darkness to it so you can attack them more easily, a dash which lets you dash into enemies which can also destroy them, double jump which I shouldn’t need to explain, and a ground stomp which also destroys enemies. Fighting is mostly done with bombs cause it’s the safest route, dashing can cause you to smash right into an enemy and lose a heart because the dash is fairly short range and it almost always ends at inopportune times when attacking an enemy with it.

The platforming is on point, there’s no sliding, you jump where you want, you wall jump from the get go. Everything feels really tight in those aspects. The platforming gets more complicated as the game continues which is nice. At first it’s just jumping on things, but eventually you have to start jumping on animals to avoid stabby thorn bushes, use the dash in the air to make jumps, even sometimes being required to roll off something then jump in the air after that and dash to land on things. It gets complicated but it does it at that slow steady pace because all of your abilities, which were mentioned in the previous paragraph, are used not only in combat but also in platforming.

Yui is adorable, and the concept of the game is well done. She goes back in time to try and warn people but everyone ignores her, thinking she was day dreaming or it was pretend or something of that nature. The only people who don’t think that aren’t people but are instead the various guardians, there’s a guardian for each major city. I only remember three of them, the guardian of the forest which is a giant stone golem, the desert guardian which is a dragon, and the ice guardian which I don’t remember.

There are likely some bugs if you backtrack, if there are you can just contact the devs and they’ll put out a patch as I found one by backtracking to the boss fight in the desert, the pathway is blocked off but I wanted to find the animals to pet. There’s something like forty animals you can pet in the game, various dogs and cats, you have achievements for doing it, and you know me, an achievement whore to the end. The issue was fixed, but I ended up needing to restart the game from the beginning because the fix also cause a chunk of the pathway to be reset and therefore blocked off for me going backwards. This thankfully won’t be an issue for any of you. Most of the bugs I would think are probably already ironed out at this point.

I only have one actual issue with the game, I can’t just mash A and get through the dialogue, it goes at its own pace and I’d really like to skip everything I’ve already seen. You can skip stuff when you start a conversation with an NPC, however, if it’s a story event you can’t skip it it goes into cutscene mode and there’s no speeding it up which is an annoyance, I’d like to just pass on by those as I work my way back up to where I was when I had to restart. I’d also like them to add the ability to make manual saves, there’s three save slots but each is tied to its own campaign and it’s just auto-saving which I hate, that’s never a good aspect for a game, what happens if the auto-save gets corrupted? The chances of auto and a few manual saves all getting corrupted is a lot lower than just one save being corrupted, I doubt this will ever be added in as most games with this style of saving stick with just that.

Overall I really like the game, everything about it is fun, you get drip fed abilities and increases to the difficulty of the game at the same rate which allows you to get better at the game slowly but surely. There’s cute pets to pet. And the devs immediately get to work trying to solve issues they’re alerted to in the game, providing they emulate the issue. The story is fantastic but I would like to skip ‘cutscenes’ I’ve already seen.

YesterMorrow was developed by Bitmap Galaxy.

Point of Sale: X1, PS4, Switch, Steam.

$20

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A review copy of the game was provided by the publisher, Blowfish Studio.

darkmikasonfire awards YesterMorrow the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval.