A good puzzle game can frustrate you at times. You get stuck trying to figure things out and then suddenly it clicks and you get that sense of accomplishment when you do. Fail to capture these moments and make a game too easy or too difficult and it just doesn’t bode well as a puzzle game. Mad About Pandas looks to thread that needle with their latest title Yerba Buena, but how did they do? 

An Interesting Story In Theory

The premise of Yerba Buena is an interesting one. You play as Barb, an everyday woman in a 1970s San Francisco. During a ride with her cab driver friend Russell, a large man approaches the cab and tries to steal it after Barb gets out. A few blocks away Barb finds the cab crashed with a strange, padlocked suitcase next to it. At the same time as all of this is going on, Barb and her friends are noticing some strange glitches in San Francisco.

Once Barb gets into the case it reveals a strange device called the Oscillator. The Oscillator is a device that can copy and paste certain mechanics in the world and apply them to the glitched items. This allows Barb to use the Oscillator to move items out of the way, move them to use them to get to another spot, make them disappear and make them rotate, just to name a few.

You are then teleported into another world which is a giant Amusement Park. Here you meet 2 characters named Florian and Leon. Leon invented the Oscillator and Florian tried to get rid of it once it was revealed how much power it had but it got into the hands of the Bay Angels.

Oh and to make things weirder for this, you are actually in an abandoned video game world and Barb and everyone else are supposed to be NPC’s in this game. But something happened during development and when the developers abandoned the game things went all screwy and the Bay Angels took over. It is now up to Barb to figure it all out, save her friend and stop the Bay Angels.

But Poor In Execution

While I like some of the ideas in Yerba Buena’s story, how Mad About Pandas put it all together is a bit disappointing. I don’t know if it’s because the whole game is set in this video game world or what, but I didn’t feel any weight behind the characters or story knowing it’s all just video game characters living in their own world. I feel like if the San Francisco parts of the world were “real” it would have had more of an impact.

I will say though as the story progresses and you get near the end of the roughly 10 hour campaign things do get a bit more interesting. I think the developers are actually trying to tell a deeper story here about AI and the potential positives and negatives of it and it did make me at least think about it.

It also didn’t help that the characters themselves I didn’t find too interesting. Barb is an ok protagonist but the rest of the cast feels pretty boring and the voice acting in the game didn’t really help with that. As a budget title I didn’t expect a Jennifer Hale like performance, but it is pretty stiff here which is disappointing.

Game Play Is King

Now while the plot of Yerba Buena might be filled with many holes, the game play thankfully is a breath of fresh air. The mechanics of the Oscillator and how you move through the world make for a great puzzle game. As mentioned earlier the Oscillator can copy certain mechanics in the game world and paste them to glitched items. Your goal is always to make it through the 14 chapters of the game typically going from point A to point B.

At the beginning of the game as you get used to the mechanics things are pretty simple. You use LT to scan your surroundings and it will highlight what can be copied, and what can be manipulated. Take a moment to look around, see that you can copy the cars moving from left to right and see an item that you can move. You have to make it to the right side of the map so you instantly know to hop on the object, scan the moving cars then shoot the object, moving you over to the next spot.

As you progress Barb learns new skills including bouncing and sticking to items which keeps things fresh and engaging throughout.

The other important mechanic is the rewind or erase mechanic allowing you to reset the item you have been manipulating. You might think why would you want to reset it, but it all makes sense as the game progresses and things get more complex.

Where Yerba Buena really thrives is in the middle and later chapters of the game. The Amusement Park levels are some of the best designed levels I’ve seen in a puzzle game in quite some time and really make you think. These levels often would combine multiple layers at once to figure out. The last big level where you are in San Francisco is really well done as well and there’s even on on the rails segment that was a joy to play and figure out.

For example in one section of the park you have to get balls to come out of either a toy or candy dispenser from high above the area. In order to get the balls to come out you have to use a nearby ferris wheel to copy and then shoot it over to the handle of the dispenser. Only the Ferris wheel is going the wrong way to turn the dispenser handle so you actually need to turn the ferris wheel to the right angle.

With the balls now coming out of the dispenser they rolled to launcher that would then shoot them up to some basketball nets. You have to make both shots in order to move on. Hitting the first shot is easy, but the second shot you have to manipulate the first basket and turn it so the backboard is now flat to the ground, find a bouncing mechanic so that the balls can hit the backboard and bounce up to the next basket.

It’s these sections that really highlight a great puzzle game. There are numerous puzzles that I sat at stumped. Some for 10 minutes, some for an hour. It can be frustrating at times for sure, but once you do figure it out you feel that great sense of accomplishment, (and admittedly sometimes a feeling of “how did you not get that earlier”).

Now there are a couple occasions where the frustration outweighs the feeling of satisfaction, but overall the game has many more moments of that gratifying sense of accomplishment.

A Vibrant San Francisco & Great Level Design

Another great thing going for Yerba Buena is its vibrant portrayal of San Francisco and its great level design. While the game isn’t going to win best art or anything it is still easy on the eyes to look at. But as mentioned before the Amusement Park levels are a masterclass in level design for a puzzle game.

I’m sure part of that was the puzzles themselves, but they are wacky, fun and just a joy to navigate through. It’s this kind of creativity that makes me fall in love with a game and Mad About Pandas has done a great job with that.

Technical Difficulties

Unfortunately where Yerba Buena really gets held back is in some of the glitches in the game (not the one’s meant to be there) and just some baffling decisions when it comes to basic features.

In my initial playthrough I made it about two thirds of the way through the game. I had come across a pretty difficult puzzle and thought I found the correct path. Turns out it wasn’t and rather than just having the ability to turn back around and go back to the previous area, I fell through the map. Now this wouldn’t be the end of the world normally. In most games I’d just reload a checkpoint, except the autosave happened as I was glitching through the map, so I was in a non stop loop.

Now in the games defense, I was in a place I wasn’t meant to be so I can’t fault them for the glitch. What made it all the more frustrating however is that the game has no restart level option and no manual saves. There is a level select option but it only lets you replay that specific level rather than revert the game back to that point.

This meant I had to restart the game from scratch. Why the developers overlooked a restart level option is puzzling to say the least. Hopefully they will add this option, but for now, it is a big miss. The other big issue was the autosaves themselves. At times they came fast and furious, and other times they were miles apart.

The on the rails section had checkpoints every couple of minutes which doesn’t seem like a long time but when there’s 20 different actions in between, there probably should have been a few more. And the boss fight at the end of the game doesn’t have a single checkpoint. Fail once and you start over. Considering the fight has 3 stages you would think there would be a checkpoint at some point.

Other than that there were a few glitches but nothing that caused me too much pain. On one of the big open world levels my game crashed during the last cutscene, forcing me to replay the last section over. Thankfully it was only a couple of minutes worth of game time, but annoying nonetheless.

Final Thoughts

Yerba Buena is a tale of good and bad. What it does well it does really well. The Oscillator’s copy and paste mechanics and excellent level design make for a fantastic puzzle adventure that will test your puzzle solving skills in every way. However with its ho-hum narrative, boring characters and mind boggling restart level omission it fails to reach that upper echelon of puzzle games.

Yerba Buena was reviewed on Xbox Series X. We’d like to thank publisher Focus Entertainment for providing a review code for purpose of this review.

Yerba Buena is available now for Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5 and PC via Steam.