Yerba Buena is a game set in a pseudo 1970s game world that follows a rather odd premise. The town you inhabit is full of glitched out objects, which has become the norm, and you play Barb, a hapless protagonist who, after getting a flat tire on her bicycle, enters the taxi of her friend Russel who then, after explaining a lot of the general background of who is who and what is going on in Yerba Buena, gets car-jacked and kidnapped by an armed brutish biker gang member named Bear.

Following the trail to Russel, Barb discovers that Bear has accidentally dropped a mysterious briefcase which contains a reality-warping device called the Oscillator. This gun-like tool can be used to copy and paste actions such as movement and direction, that you can transfer from one object to another to bend and manipulate the world around you in order to save your friends life.

Without giving away too many secrets or strategies, I want to attempt to explain how this "NPC"-driven game within a game works, and avoid any bigger, more impactful spoilers that could directly affect your play through. There may be elements touched on here that you consider spoilers, so please only carry on reading at your own risk.

FPS Puzzling in Escher-like Worlds

Following your acquisition of this new device, you must endure a 7-stage tutorial section that demonstrates the pros and cons of the Oscillator. Essentially, the tool can be used to copy one trait at a time, for example, borrowing the motion of a non glitched-out object, such as a car driving left to right, and paste that action onto an eligible glitched object, such as a garbage dumpsters or even buildings, to deploy that exact motion upon the subject matter. This means that potentially, you can shift buildings along an axis, spin them, or even raise or lower them, to further your advancement towards the rescue mission to save Russel.

The Oscillator has a Portal gun quality to it, though it clearly has a 70s inspired "techy" aesthetic with its aerial, ribbon cables and LEDs adorning it. The main LEDs are blue and orange, as you would expect from a Portal gun too, with the reticle turning orange to indicate an object with a trait you can copy, and turning blue over an object that the trait can be pasted on to.

The net result can be some wacky and bizarre Escher-esque architecture being created by moving and rotating split in half apartment blocks.

You can essentially complete every level in several ways, with the main, most obvious ways, being straightforward and simple, or alternatively you can opt to try bend the game a little, and figure out different ways to trundle through the objectives. Opting for the latter makes the game trickier to traverse by timing you jumps and forging unorthodox paths, but it results in chapters being quicker to complete.

There are 14 chapters in Yerba Buena, each one introducing new mechanics to you, such as bouncing, sticking or fading, and layers of story heavy cinematics to flesh out the overarching story. Of those 14 chapters three are set in a fairground-like environment, two are set in the "San Francisco" biome, and more than a few of them are simply several minute-long story-linking pieces. There is also a terrible "QTE" car chase and one boss to beat, but I won't go into those too much other than to say they feel bolted on and extremely underwhelming.

The game truly starts at chapter 3 and the crescendo comes in chapter 13, so I would consider there only being 6-7 true "levels" to explore across just a handful of varied environments, but everything is so repetitive you could be forgiven for misremembering something, because they all seem to blend into one eventually.

Monotony and Tedium in Good measure

As indicated above, for me, tedium set in extremely quickly. The fatigue of repetition hit me way faster than I expected.

It's not that the puzzles aren't at least mildly interesting, its perhaps purely the process involved with the main mechanics of the game and never having a library of moves to draw from, and the fact that the puzzles never scale up, they're all extremely similar in nature.

Needing to continually copy and paste, while having the constraints of firstly, number of steps, yes, if you walk too far you lose the last thing you copied to the Oscillator, and secondly, failing to put the pasted trait on the correct object, you have to go back and re-copy the trait again to then to an place it on the right object.

Not to mention needing to put multiple traits on one object, without the ability to expand the devices ability to copy one singular action. No, your only in-game tool never truly comes into it's own or gets a meaningful upgrade. It's overly restrictive with no good reasoning.

Doing this only serves to elongate the amount of time you need to spend finding the solution, rather than employing all you've seen and learnt so far into solving the task in front of you. On one hand, I get this choice made by the developers, it's the crux of the game, but other games in this genre rarely make you feel like you have to go backwards to go forwards again. Thankfully, you can scan the environment for usable motions, though this definitely feels like a mechanic put in to mitigate some of these frustrations I'm attempting to describe.

I liked the use of everyday objects to copy the motion you require from, for example cranes or ceiling fans, or cars for example, and the ability to scan the environment, and the electrical circuit, laser-based sections certainly looked exciting, but they were confusing because it's not always clear where you need to get to, or what's the correct path to take. While this does add to the explorative formula, it also makes the player feel like they're running around in circles, in a trial-and-error loop, forced to hunt down the exact movement you require.

On second thoughts, perhaps that too is intentional and meta, given the fact that you and all the inhabitants are just NPCs on paths going around and round....

More Meta, Less Quality Control

As an unassigned NPC discovering her role in the "world" she lives in, the game explores some interesting territory when it comes to the game beyond the core game. Much like how the Matrix movies expanded our brains, the concept of self awakening and seeing the bigger picture is a neat concept to explore in this indie title.

I particularly liked the inside jokes of the t-pose guy, and to some extent the in-game developer logs, made by Arnes Herzon of "Pyramid interactive", the company responsible for the game Barb finds herself within, made in the year 2050, and therefore the dev logs are for the fictitious game within the game you're playing, if that makes sense.

Throughout the game, you find random objects and note them down in your journal, but none seem to do anything. An example of this is the Vacuum and toaster are noted down, but never seem to serve a purpose. I can't workout if I missed what they were useful for, or if they're simply an afterthought or something that goes entirely unused.

Platforming in this game is just jumping. You have a jump button, and sometimes you need to use it to get to new areas, but the exacting nature of the pixel perfect jumps is utterly infuriating. It could have been good to have more fleshed out running and jumping traversal, especially with all the exploration intended of the game.

Many of the puzzles are the same over and over. You progress to a new chapter, your expectations are that the puzzles will become more challenging and more interesting, but alas, they don't. Some add new elements to mix them up, but ultimately each puzzle feels like a repetitious copy/paste fever dream.

Graphically Stylish But Challenged Overall

One final issue I have with this game are the graphics themselves. The screenshots do not convey the motion of the game, and the really strange smudgy, blurry frame rates specifically you get when you pivot to turn. The result is a jarring experience.

Running the game on a PS5 Pro, I expected silky smooth visuals, but instead I was met with obnoxiously jittery motion, and zero options in-game to alter the quality or performance. 

Is Yerba Buena worth recommending? I'm not sure. It does have an intriguing story, and an endearing art style, but something about it just doesn't gel for me and so I can't really say that it's fun of exciting to endure because there is no real feeling of upgrade progression, zero truly exciting moments, and a general feeling of lackluster game design dragging one core concept kicking and screaming with it all the way to the end.

Personally, I would save my £22 for something more exciting.