How do you make a spiritual successor stand out?

A spiritual successor (or a homage, clone, rip-off, whatever you want to call it) is very much a double-edged sword for game developers. On one hand it doesn't take much thought or experimentation to design them, but on the other hand, how exactly do you give these kinds of games their own identity so that they can stand out on their own? This is particularly an issue for indie developers, because the lower budget guarantees that you will never be able to match the original in aspects like polish or visuals.

Back in 2015, many a 3D platformer fan - myself included - were left hungering for a new game. Super Mario 3D World came out two years before, and while it was fine, the problem with it was that that's all there is to say about it. I'm not even going into detail about Sonic Lost World, and I genuinely can't recall a single 3D platformer that released in 2014. Enter Project Ukulele, a new project from Playtonic Games, a new developer consisting of a few unsatisified Rare employees. A few months later, Yooka-Laylee launched its crowdfunding campaign and quickly broke Kickstarter records as it became the fastest game on the platform to receive a million US dollars at the time. Clearly the hunger for new 3D platformers was alive and strong, yet the game itself released a few years later to much worse reception. Critics were apathetic, consumers were mixed and while the franchise still has its fans, it quickly faded out of the public consciousness. Not even the release of a much better received spin-off or the announcement of a sequel was enough to bring Yooka-Laylee back into the spotlight.

While I have talked with many people who like The Impossible Lair, I haven't talked with many people who actually beat it. The final level taking somewhere between 30 to 45 minutes might be a reason.

So what exactly went wrong with Yooka-Laylee? Well, whatever obvious criticism you may or may not have about the original game, The Impossible Lair or the franchise in general, the biggest problem it faces is less obvious - it never got to step outside of Rare's shadow.

One easy way to make your spiritual successor stand out is to theme it around something different. Banjo-Kazooie has a clear fairy tale theme, with a cast of talking animals, fairies, pirates, and whatever Klungo is as well as a slightly grim sense of humor. A magician with a skull for a face uses magic powers to transform you into crazy forms which you then use to rescue your sister from a nasty old witch, complete with broom and talking pot who assures her that she is the prettiest girl in the land. In contrast, I have no clue if Yooka-Laylee was even supposed to have a theme. The two main characters are a lizard and a bat (what's up with that?), and while their designs are good, I can't tell you how they're supposed to fit in with a low-poly dinosaur, a vending machine with a face, a skeleton in a pot, a duck with his head in a jar and a bee in a business suit.

I know this gripe is super minor, but how come they never added the Yooka-Laylee rap to the game? Seems like a waste to just keep it on YouTube.

The plot of the game involves having to save Yooka and Laylee's book from said bee, who uses a machine to steal it for unknown reasons, which also doesn't quite gel together. If your main characters are animals and the villain is a CEO, having him bulldoze the forest where Yooka and Laylee live to make way for tacky souvenir shops and trendy coffee stores seems like a much more obvious fit. The villain doesn't even get his own army of corporate drones, overworked salarymen, henchmen in suits or anything like that, instead you just mostly fight gremlins. One of the bosses in this game is a wall with a face. Another is an ice block with a face.

What especially gets my goat about Yooka-Laylee's setting is that all the levels are contextualized as books, and the act of collecting Pagies and using them to expand the worlds fits well with that, yet all the environments, while pretty, are mostly bog-standard platformer worlds. Jungle, snow, swamp, casino... where's the fantasy world with castles, dragons and knights? The sci-fi world where you jump across flying cars and glowing skyscrapers? The noire world where everything's in black and white and you investigate crimes? The game simply never utilizes this potential, which feels like a waste of a good idea. At least the environments use unique setpieces, like the tribal structures of Tribalstack Tropics, the ice castles of Glitterglaze Glacier and the giant gambling machines of Capital Cashino... all of which the next game, The Impossible Lair, never uses. It does have plenty of ordinary towns, forests and factories however, like a typical platformer setting. While there's nothing wrong with that per sé, the result ends up looking like a game from a completely different franchise.

Of course themes, characters and settings aren't everything. The best way to make your spiritual successor truly stand out is to change the moment-to-moment gameplay. It doesn't even have to be in a major way, just some new mechanic that changes how players approach obstacles is enough, say by adding a dash move, a rolling move, a grappling hook... Yooka-Laylee and The Impossible Lair both make a few changes to their respective formulas, but as far as actual moment-to-moment gameplay changes go, the ones I want to highlight in particular are Yooka-Laylee's stamina meter and The Impossible Lair's health system.

Banjo-Kazooie had a wide variety of different moves, some of which consumed collectibles to use. Shooting eggs consumes eggs, flying consumes feathers and becoming invulnerable consumes Golden Feathers, which are rare and can only be carried in stacks of ten. This makes sense in a collectathon and assures that the player will never be able too powerful, but still leaves the possibility for the player to stock up so they can go to town to fart out grenades everywhere if they wish. Yooka-Laylee uses a stamina meter, which slowly refills itself, although it can also be refilled by eating butterflies. Most of the time, however, there aren't any butterflies around, so most of your fun or important moves (particularly rolling, which makes you go much faster and lets you roll up most steep hills) simply make you wait in-between uses. The stamina meter can be upgraded, but it's still bizarre that a 3D platformer would ever make you wait to use the fun moves.

It doesn't help that Yooka-Laylee's moves have lacking instructions, which this great Design Doc video goes over. For the longest time, I had no clue the Camo Cloak ability lets you reflect lasers.

Moving forward a bit, in the old Donkey Kong Country games, your partner acts as your health bar. You play as two Kongs at a time. When you get hit you lose the Kong you're playing as, who gets replaced by the Kong in back. If you don't have a Kong at your side, you die and lose a life, and starting from DKC2 if you had both Kongs you could do some special bonus moves, like throwing your partner around. The Impossible Lair does something similar with its Laylee system, which works like this: you play as Yooka with Laylee sitting on you, similar to Donkey Kong Country Returns and Tropical Freeze. If you get hit, Laylee starts flying around in a panic for a few seconds. If you manage to grab her before she flies off-screen, you get her back. If you don't have Laylee, then you lose access to both the Twirl Jump and Buddy Slam moves, and now when you get hit you die and respawn at the last checkpoint and lose some Quills. You can also get Laylee back by ringing a Dingbat, which can be occassionally found in levels.

While it's an interesting idea to let the player shrug off damage if they recover quickly enough, most of the time it's a rather frustrating system to deal with. Laylee moves quickly and erratically, like Baby Mario on speed, and without the right Tonic she flies off rather quickly as well. Back when I first played The Impossible Lair she also had a habit of getting stuck on level terrain or even clipping into it sometimes. I don't know if that was ever fixed, but getting Laylee back in any level segment that's cramped or filled with enemies ended up almost never being worth the attempt.

But the biggest problem with this health system isn't even that, it's that you need Laylee to obtain a few of the TWIT coins. Scattered through each level are four collectible coins, and a lot of these tends to be in either situations that don't let you attempt to get it a second time (like when the level doesn't let you backtrack by cutting you off with a one-way door, or when you need to jump off an enemy that doesn't respawn) or requires Laylee to get it. It was never not painful when I ditched her because she got stuck somewhere I couldn't reach, only to realize I couldn't get the next TWIT coin because it was underneath something I needed to Buddy Slam. You could just shrug off these coins as not being worth the effort, but they are mandatory for progress. You need to pay Trowzer in TWIT coins in order to get past the various Paywalls on the overworld.

Funnily enough, the overworld itself is probably the best part of The Impossible Lair despite the Paywalls. It kinda made me want to see Playtonic tackle a full-on Yooka-Laylee puzzle spin-off.

Both the stamina meter and the Laylee system don't even impact the moment-to-moment gameplay that much, but they're still the biggest changes these games make, and whenever they do have an impact they're usually a source of frustration. That really is a shame, because there is plenty they could've done instead to shake up the formula in these games. Seeing as your main character is a chameleon, why not build the game around his tongue? In the first game you use Yooka's tongue to eat butterflies to refill health/stamina and eat objects to gain their properties like a timed powerup, and in the second game it's how you grab objects. It'd be much more interesting if they built the whole game around it, letting you latch onto walls to jump off or grab onto grappling hooks to swing around levels. Those are absolutely not original ideas, but they work. Either way, as long as Yooka-Laylee and The Impossible Lair had some notable mechanic that shook up the moment-to-moment gameplay, they could've avoided most of the comparisons people keep making with the Rare games of old. They could've even stood side by side with them.

The saddest part is that Yooka-Laylee could've been just an awkward first step as the franchise figures out what it tries to do. Many classic game franchises only started taking off after their second or third installment, after all. The thing about impressions in this industry is that for the public, the first game of a franchise is what it can be, but the second game is what it should be. Yooka-Laylee could have made an easy recovery as long as the next Yooka game they showed off was something new and unexpected, even if it wasn't the sequel. The problem was they announced The Impossible Lair instead. Even though it's a pretty good idea to use some of the original game's assets to make a lower budget spin-off so you have some more funds for the sequel, and even though some people - myself included - were excited by that game's announcement, in the eyes of the public it mostly just cemented the franchise as being a shameless Rare rip-off.

Whatever they do with the next Yooka-Laylee game, I hope they find something to build the whole game around, something that lets it stand on its own merits. That said, no matter how hard the franchise tries to become its own thing from now on, it's going to be very hard to shake off that label.

(Thanks to the Yooka-Laylee Wiki for the in-game screenshots. I've only played these games on the Switch, so I don't have an easy way to take my own.)