Quick Review: Yono and the Celestial Elephants

He’s a chonk, he’s an absolute unit, he’s friggin’ a-do-ra-ble!

Cutie patootie! He's adorable and I want a
plushie of him.

Developed by Neckbolt, published by Plug In Digital and released on October 12th, 2017, Yono and the Celestial Elephants features an elephant protagonist descended onto the world from a fallen star. He is soon found by the locals and begins a journey across this odd land inhabited by the living, by some (actually quite nice) living dead, and by some living robots. Yono is the seventh elephant to descend to the mortal plane across the last 20,000 years. He proceeds to solve everybody’s problems, and maybe help this civilization retrieve memory of the past elephants, too.

Yono moves around with the arrows or WASD, interacts with E, can do a headbutt attack with Space, target with the left Tab, and blow things away with a trunk toot using Crtl. The trunk toot can also allow him to take in water, which he can then spray onto a target. Further down the line, he can also suck in peanuts and throw them at stuff, or take in some hot peppers to spew fire.

Doing a big sippy to water the garden below, all while
giving a rooster a guided tour on his back.

The way I'm dressed right now, cruelty
towards ceramic pottery was inevitable.

The story itself involves, among other things: The mysterious disappearance of the princess of Knightingale; the nice undead from Sundergarden are worried as the new skeletons popping out of the ground are evil; and some trade disagreements between the Kingdom and Freehaven, where the robots live, and yearn for complete autonomy. For a game that presents itself as quite child-friendly in both looks, tone and difficulty, there’s a good handful of deeper messages to be found here, blending political, spiritual and philosophical commentary.

Get out of there so you can see the constellations painted on me!

What better than water to douse a monster's life fire?

Gameplay is a mix of 3D platforming and puzzle, with a bigger emphasis on puzzle-solving but exploration and combat also being present. Aside from very creative puzzle-based bosses, combat against regular enemies is bland – generally, all you really can do is headbutt them till they explode or fall over. Platforming is also limited since Yono can’t jump, but it is present. There are quests to complete in the towns, mostly of the “fetch” type, as by pressing the E key Yono can also take an item (or even an animal!) and put it on his back to carry. Cuteness all around. For what I perceive to be the target audience for this one, puzzles are just the right difficulty; they were overall pretty easy for me, with just a handful that were trickier, mostly near the end, and I assume it would feel like a natural progression of logical thinking for a younger gamer. Most of the puzzles are of the block-pushing and "key and lock" varieties – stuff we’ve already seen aplenty, in all honesty, but for what could be someone's first puzzle game, it works just fine.

This body paint option is called "The Elephantom Menace".
No, really.

Ice blocks slide all the way across the floor. Like I said,
this game has plenty of those classic block slide puzzles.

On top of the game looking beautiful and adorable, its music is also quite good. Beyond the main quest, there’s a couple of bonus things to do, like gathering letters to unlock the stories of the previous six elephants who walked this land. You can also customize Yono by passing by the salon and give him various looks, ranging from “constellations” to “Darth Maul” passing by “green tunic”. (Hey, if you’re gonna break pots all over the place, better reference the OG breaker of pots.)

Celestial elephant or not, fire is still gonna hurt.

Some of my gripes with controls can be understandable; of course Yono is slow, he’s an elephant. The isometric look works well for the puzzle aspect, but can make controls a little tricky – you do have the option to keep controls in the regular 4 directions, or to tilt them one diagonal or another (so that by pressing Up, Yono will go either north-west or north east, at your choice, instead of straight up). I also ran into a few more glitches in the final stretches of the game compared to previous areas; stuff like the camera not following Yono, or something getting stuck on his back. Despite those small issues, I think this is a pretty good game which I’d say deserves to be more known.

Yono and the Celestial Elephants is available for 14.99$ USD.