Indie Game of the Week 476: Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom

I know I recently concluded a half-season of 3D platformers for the N64 but, by the many hopping critters of that bedevilled platform, I have to admit that it's stirred a familiar itch to play more of the same even if I know eight more of those things are coming my way around September. Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is an intriguing variant for two reasons: you're a tiny yellow taxi of the autonomous kind, since you live in a world of robotic creations courtesy of the local inventor and mechanic "Morio"; and secondly, you are prohibited from jumping. Your suspension simply doesn't allow for it. Despite the setback, you have been built to combat the evil, environmentally-catastrophic aggressive takeover by the Tosla corporation, led by Alien Mosk, which is a fictitious construct that's possibly (though not certainly) related to any real life company or its ketamine-addicted owner.

Just about on the safe side of visually overwhelming. Sufficiently whelmed.

Back to not being able to jump. The thing with the Yellow Taxi, the one of Going Vroom fame, is that while it can't leave the ground easily it can speed up in short bursts which is something perhaps more expected from a vehicle. The boost isn't enough to clear long gaps but, if you should have any sort of incline to use a ramp, you can get some pretty serious air by launching yourself off that. As any YTGV veteran will tell you: If there's a slope, there's hope. The game's masterstroke is letting you think this whole boosts-and-slopes mechanic is the only trick up the game's sleeve, and that it behooves you to figure out how to use that technique to get the game's many collectibles strewn about its equally numbersome and quite oddly connected stages, but additional revelations start trickling through the more you play the game and the more you take a gander off the beaten path—that is, beyond the linear series of levels that you unlock one after the other upon reaching certain collectible milestones—and thus are more techniques ascertained. It's the type of game, like Antichamber and Toki Tori 2 and a few others from back in the day, where you start with every (or just most? I'm not privy to all the game's secrets yet) piece of tech you'll ever need to complete all its challenges and find its most elusive shinies: you just need to find whomever is willing to tell you about them first.

Yellow Taxi very much lives in a sort of Sega Dreamcast platformer era with its vaguely Sonic-esque rolling hills, checkerboard grass, and plenty of saturated colors and cel-shaded visuals to nostalgically appreciate. It's not the kind of game that necessarily prods you too much to get to the ridiculous level of platforming mastery 100% completion might entail; through its presentation, its copious (coprophilious?) amount of poop and fart jokes, the way you can just run pedestrians down if you don't feel like talking to them for lore and hints (neither of which are typically all that useful outside of the hard-to-find experts), and the tiny slap on the wrist that is losing a small fraction of your currency (otherwise spent on cosmetic hats and that's about it) for every death makes it the sort of game you could plop your kid in front of if you perhaps weren't too worried about the game's genial approach to vehicular manslaughter. Probably be healthier for them than GTA, at least. It is a game that literally dares you to find all its secrets on its Steam store page but at the same time it's going to give you a pretty reasonable breadcrumb trail to pursue if you don't feel like taking every other turn in the Labyrinth of Crete that is its multi-branching world map.

I rarely see maps as elaborately strung together as this outside of exploraction games. Or serial killer lairs.

As with a similar 3D platformer/open-world driving game of a similar vintage, Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip, it's a game built for mindless fecking around as much as it is a completionist-fest for the truly cracked. Yet by digging deeper for its secrets you have this sensation of joining some exclusive underworld organization that understands the universe on a deeper level, and using that forbidden tech you find that the treasures you had to pass up because they were distressingly high or far away are now finally within reach. That series of veils being lifted from your eyes makes the game all the more compelling than even its welcoming sense of mindless mayhem, an intriguing something that awaits in the darkest depths for those brave enough to seek it out should they ever tire of running down oddly-named NPCs like a shark wearing a fishbowl to breathe on land or muscle-bound gym rats who always refer to you as "king" regardless of gender or species. It's a similar feeling to when you discover Super Mario 64's reverse jump or sliding tackle after playing for 20 hours and wondering how you ever got by without that knowhow. I still very much approve of the Banjo-Kazooie method of only unlocking new skills once you're ready for them (or more specifically when the upcoming level design finally requires them) but there's something magical about discovering something that was always available and under your nose the whole time, and more magical still when you figure it out on your own just by faffing around.

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom was already my jam, being a colorful 3D platformer with a heavy emphasis on collecting useless shit, but that added secretive layer of intrigue behind its more elusive mechanics adds an almost exploraction-esque quality to the game that makes it shine all the brighter. I could do without the scatological humor and, by the nature of your protagonist, it's Tank Controls City which isn't perhaps as much an issue when you're moving and turning around as quickly as you do here (tanks are, after all, just painfully slow vehicles) but aside from a few stylistic-based reservations I'm very much into what's going on here. And it even occasionally remembers its protagonist's role in society and lets you ferry passengers around in some of the stages, so if you've been missing a Crazy Taxi revival that has zero AI involved (at least on a development level; I did mention this game has an awful lot of robots in it) it's got you covered here too. I can definitely see myself continuing to pull out hair that I really can't afford to lose this late in the game with its challenges throughout this weekend and potentially beyond.

The gym was an eye-opener, for a great many reasons. Not a single slope to be found in here, and yet here I am in the rafters regardless.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

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