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WiiU

NWR Staff's 10 Favorite Games of 2015

Yoshi's Woolly World

by Becky Hollada - January 20, 2016, 6:20 pm EST

Proof that great games don’t always need a high difficulty curve.

It’s not enough anymore for a video game to be just challenging. More titles come out every year taking full advantage of inventive concepts to create veritable pieces of art, and aesthetic is an important part of that. Nintendo’s first foray into the more visual driven territory came about with Kirby’s Epic Yarn. For the first time, a platformer was design about a specific visual concept that was then translated into gameplay, and boy, were we glad to see it. Kirby was awesome to say the least, so expectations were high when Nintendo announced a new first party title following in the same tradition: Yoshi’s Woolly World.

Yoshi-centric games have never been known for their gameplay difficulty, to the point where Woolly World could be marathoned over a single weekend for a quick review. However, this ease of play was one of the things that really made for an enjoyable experience. Every component to the game, from the ground up, was designed to be fun to play but also fun to look at. Spending too much time with difficult puzzles would deny you the chance to really take in the game’s visuals, which would be a horrible shame. Fabric textures were beautifully crafted into the backgrounds and models but also into puzzles and the entire atmosphere, and the Wii U’s graphics really made the whole thing shine.

And a discussion about Woolly World cannot be complete without mentioning the awesome amiibo created for this game. They’re well-made, positively adorable, and have great appeal for a different audience than the Smash series amiibo. Not to mention Yarn Yoshi was the first time we got to see Nintendo do something really different for their toys-to-life IP, and personally, they were some of my favorite things to come out of Nintendo in 2015.

Any time I feel like I need something to unwind, Yoshi’s Woolly World is there for me. And while I did beat every regular level once already, I still have plenty left to do and it never leaves me bored. Sometimes games as works of art can forget engaging gameplay, but it’s amazing to see more and more games finding the happy medium, especially bigger, first party titles

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