YesterMorrow Review: Needs More Time | Screen Rant
YesterMorrow, developed by Bitmap Galaxy and published by Blowfish Studios, is a platform game based around time-traveling between the childhood and teenage years of its protagonist. The game never fully lives up to the potential of its premise, and it's plagued by a number of technical issues at launch that sour the experience.
YesterMorrow is a fantasy game that follows a young girl named Yui, on the day of the Celebration of Light festival in her isolated village. An army of shadow monsters descends upon the event and Yui is injured in the escape. Time shifts forward to a teen version of Yui, in a world that is overcome by the shadows. Yui discovers time portals that allow her to return to her childhood self, and she starts a quest to save the two timelines from destruction.
YesterMorrow is a light Metroidvania platform game wherein the player gradually unlocks new abilities that lets them access new areas. These include the ability to throw grenades made of light, perform double jumps, and even freeze time for a few seconds. The new abilities work alongside Yui's existing arsenal of wall jumps & rolls, giving her incredible freedom of movement in her environment. Yui doesn't have many offensive weapons, so the name of the game is bypassing enemies and hazards, rather than fighting them.
Yui has the ability to shift between the past and present at specific spots, but the game does almost nothing with this gimmick. The time travel gimmick is only used for journeying to different versions of the same level, and the potential for interesting time-based puzzles is completely unused. Instead, the game is a standard explorer/platform game with some special abilities thrown in. The gameplay is mostly average fare, but it has problems on a technical level.
The biggest issue with YesterMorrow at launch is the number of bugs and performance glitches that plague the entire experience. YesterMorrow suffers from consistent slowdown whenever enemies & moving elements start appearing on the screen. The game also suffers from consistent stuttering and dropped frames. These are major issues in a platformer that is heavy on twitch responses and timing, to the point where it almost completely ruins the experience. The issues are especially present in boss battles. We only managed to finish the glitch-filled second boss battle with the help of more glitches, while numerous runs against the Shadow Dragon boss battle were ruined by an inability to dodge effectively during the final phase of the fight. YesterMorrow is badly in need of a patch and it's hard to recommend a purchase until it's fixed.
On the plus side, YesterMorrow has pretty sprites, a gorgeous game world (despite the repetition of its environments), and the soundtrack is fittingly soothing/ominous as the situation requires. The game regularly doles out health refills and save points, so tricky situations rarely become an issue for long. The characters are one-note and the story isn't memorable, but fans of the platforming genre should appreciate the gameplay challenges that YesterMorrow offers, once the glitches are fixed.
If YesterMorrow is fixed, then it would make for a decent, if unambitious game. As it stands, the technical issues are so distracting that we can't recommend it in its current form. The odd glitch can be overlooked in a title during its launch window, but the problems in YesterMorrow are so persistent that they undermine the entire experience.
YesterMorrow will be released for Nintendo Switch, PC (via GOG & Steam), PS4, and Xbox One today, November 4, 2020. Screen Rant was provided with a digital code for the Switch version of the game for the purposes of this review.