I finally got sick of the tedium of Indika even though I still believe it is a fantastic looking game. Unfortunately the cryptic puzzles just aren't very fun and I finished the game by just watching someone else play the rest of it on YouTube because it stopped being fun running around trying to solve these silly puzzles that are so difficult that you just end up looking up all the answers online anyway.
I will say this though, the story was fantastic... one of the best I've ever seen in fact.
But I wanted to move onto something a bit more casual, cute, and just plain fun. That, my friends, is Yoku's Island Express
In this game you play the role of some sort of creature that has a rock attached to you for some reason that you have to pull around everywhere that you go. It seems really stupid until you quickly realize that this is how they managed to make a cutesy little RayMan looking game into a pinball RPG. Who would have ever thought that such a combination was possible.
I grew up in a time where the graphical capabilities of our consoles and even PC's were not very good, so often, the best games to play were pinball games. Alien Crush and Devil's Crush are two games that I absolutely loved but they weren't RPG's.. They were a game where you aspired to get the highest score that you could and unfortunately that doesn't stay interesting for very long.
In Yoku you have a lot of objectives to complete as well as a very large map to traverse.
Certain aspects of this game are also quite Metroidvania in a way because you obtain certain skills or access to certain things later on in your travels that open up even more parts of the map that you couldn't reach the first time you were in a certain area. Also, just like in Metroid or Castlevania, you gain access to fast-travel ports as you move through the game, which is good because even though getting around isn't difficult, it would be arduous to walk all the way to the various areas that you have to get to at some point.
One thing I really enjoy about this aside from the very casual and "you can't lose" aspects of this game is that they even figured out a way to make boss battles out of pinball segments. These are seriously fun and inventive and all in all there are probably a dozen different pinball sections in the game all of which are delightfully different.
This is a game that you can play without really thinking a great deal and this sense it is a far cry from Indika or even Far Cry.
The music is good, the graphics are exaggerated and whimsical just like Ray Man and it is pretty clear that they drew some inspiration from those games.
If you have a Nintendo Switch this game is currently just $4 through a digital special of sorts that ends in just a few days so you better hurry. It's overpriced on PS5 at $20 and it is odd to me that this game never appeared on PS-Plus as a feature. I have no idea what it costs on Xbox or PC.
Unless you are some sort of hardcore gamer that requires a great level of difficulty and precise timing in order to have fun playing games, I think you will like this. I tend to not enjoy the games that are considered difficult, so for me, this game is an excellent way to relax and just have some simple fun.
I highly recommend you give it a try.