Yerba Buena review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

I’m a huge fan of Yerba Buena’s overall vibe. It’s set in an alternate version of 1970s San Francisco, where your character is tasked with taking on a gang of bikers with superpowers and figuring out why the city has been dealing with an ever-increasing number of glitches. The game sets you down in a vibrant, brightly coloured city that doesn’t look like anything else I can think of, and figures out a way to look cartoony while still having enough realism to it that it feels…well, exactly what you’d expect an alt-San Francisco from the ‘70s to look like.

I wish, then, that I was as big a fan of Yerba Buena’s gameplay.

I mean, it comes close to doing something as fun and original as its setting. It’s a first-person puzzler that borrows from the likes of Portal without ever stealing from it. Instead of creating holes, you have to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B by using your portal gun – sorry, your “Oscillator” – to make some objects move a certain way. Want to raise your platform? Then find another object on the screen moving up and down. Want to get across a gap? Then find something moving back and forth.

Unfortunately, the execution leaves a fair amount to be desired. Even though you can scan your environment to find the objects you can interact with, too often it feels like you’re hunting for the tiniest bit of movement and the one object you can then move. It makes the world feel flat and static; while I know that making it so you can manipulate everything likely would’ve been beyond the game’s budget, by not doing it, it makes the world feel less alive.

It also doesn’t help that the puzzles tend to be so rigid in their solutions. If you think back to Portal, one of the best things about it was the way the game had a clear answer in mind, but it still allowed you to test out different ideas and find solutions your own way. Yerba Buena doesn’t have that: there’s usually one solution, and if you mess up a step at any point you basically need to reset the level and try again. It makes the game feel needlessly prescriptive, which is at odds with its fun vibe.

But it’s frustrating, because Yerba Buena is so close to being so much better than that. It’s got its world-building down pat, but the developers forgot to make the world fun to play in at the same time.

Focus Entertainment provided us with a Yerba Buena PC code for review purposes.