Yooka-Laylee’s Nintendo 64 mode doesn’t really look all that different

Yooka-Laylee, the spiritual successor to classic platforming game Banjo-Kazooie, is getting a new feature. Playtonic Games has given us a sneak peek of its “64-Bit Tonic,” which will transform the normally high-definition game into a low-resolution world, similar to the Nintendo 64’s low polygon landscape. The idea is to make it look more like a game you would have played back in colorful mascot platformers’ heyday, but if the teaser is anything to go by, it doesn’t look all that different. 

Yooka-Laylee, the spiritual successor to classic platforming game Banjo-Kazooie, is getting a new feature. Playtonic Games has given us a sneak peek of its “64-Bit Tonic,” which will transform the normally high-definition game into a low-resolution world, similar to the Nintendo 64’s low polygon landscape. The idea is to make it look more like a game you would have played back in colorful mascot platformers’ heyday, but if the teaser is anything to go by, it doesn’t look all that different. 

Originally, the N64 mode was part of the Yooka-Laylee stretch goals from its Kickstarter campaign, which Playtonic is currently working to fulfill. There’s also new content incoming and the promised developer commentary series. The sneak peek is reassurance that these new additions are still coming despite the silence surrounding the project since launch. 

The problem is that the screenshot, while clearly a work in progress, doesn’t really resemble any Nintendo 64 game. It looks closer to a PlayStation 2 snapshot at best, but most of all it doesn’t really look that much different from the regular game. To have your “demastered” version look so similar to the original is a self-own if there ever was one.

Playtonic has also stated that the company is indeed “alive,” and listening to fan feedback, with “fun stuff” coming to fans soon. If this “64-Bit Tonic” is supposed to engender feelings of nostalgia for a bygone era of gaming, it might need a bit of improvement before going live. Right now it feels hopelessly in the present.