Image credit: Em Stonham for Kyusai/Mad About Pandas/Focus Entertainment
Ever since its demo, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the full release of Yerba Buena. Developed by Mad About Pandas and published by Focus Entertainment, the game promised a funky blend of fourth-wall-breaking narratives and puzzling platforming sequences.
The Yerba Buena demo set my expectations high, but thankfully, the full release of the game met them swimmingly. Here’s a full, spoiler-free review of Yerba Buena to help you decide whether the groovy title is one to pick up for your own library.
Glitching through the fourth wall
Yerba Buena is a dimension-warping puzzle game that takes place in 1970s San Francisco, placing you in the befuddled shoes of Barbara.
The game starts off setting the scene – Barb wants to find her feet but feels stuck in a rut, and her friends are equally focused on finding their purpose in life. There’s something strange going on in the city, with a plague-like Glitch and a strange radio tower tied to a malevolent figure.
The story quickly escalates, with a friend getting into trouble and Barb coming across a mysterious tool called the Oscillator.
The Oscillator is a tape-like, gun-like tool that can warp reality, copying and pasting movement from the overworld onto glitchy items. For example, copying the movement of a car driving to the left will let you paste it onto a glitching platform, moving it along to the left.
It’s a neat tool that receives several upgrades as you progress through the game, expanding your toolkit and helping you manage new platforming challenges.
Barb ends up wielding the Oscillator without really understanding its power at first, and ends up having to travel through a whimsical, funhouse-styled alternate universe to learn about it, meeting a few strange but friendly faces along the way.
This review is a spoiler-free one, so I won’t get too into the specific story beats, but the stakes are high, with everything from corrupt police to biker gangs being thrown into the mix.
Despite the story being fantastical, I found the characters to be realistic and grounded, for the most part, and enjoyed the writing style.
Punchy platforming puzzles
The core gameplay in Yerba Buena moves between dialogue scenes and platforming challenges, with a little exploration thrown into the mix.
You’ll need to navigate platforming sequences with the Oscillator, warping across obstacles and creating new paths to get to target characters or items, all while unpicking the mystery that’s baked into the city’s streets.
The puzzles and platforming sequences felt like they were inspired by Portal – as a massive Portal lover, this is what drew me to the game initially – but they also felt sufficiently unique, too.
Some gun-based puzzle platformers simply repackage Portal mechanics, which is fine enough; it’s a classic for a reason, after all, but Yerba Buena stands up as a gem in its own right. It felt like more of an homage to the era of puzzle games that Portal inspired, rather than a beat-for-beat replication.
There was a decent difficulty curve in Yerba Buena, with the platforming sections getting steadily trickier as the game unfolded. They never felt brutally unfair, but they did present a decent challenge in the later chapters.
I adored the visual style of Yerba Buena. The characters each had distinctive, lively models – the outfits were fantastic – and the level design was interesting, too.
While it was a partially linear game due to the chapter-based format, there was still an element of exploration and player autonomy, with some puzzles or challenges having multiple solutions. Exploration felt rewarding, particularly when I stumbled upon my first collectible.
Performance-wise, Yerba Buena ran well, with no major issues, bugs, or quirks to report. I have a fairly low-range PC, but the game still ran smoothly and didn’t have any major frame drops or texture issues during my time with it.
If you’re a fan of puzzle-platformers or titles like Portal, Yerba Buena is one to watch. It’s on the shorter side, particularly if you’re not inclined to chase collectibles, but the story is rich, the platforming is fun, and the world itself is beautiful. What’s not to love?
FAQs
Yerba Buena was developed by Mad About Pandas and published by Focus Entertainment.
Yerba Buena is a puzzle-platformer where players can copy and paste movement from the overworld to solve platforming segments.
The Yerba Buena release date was May 26, 2026.
Yerba Buena is available on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
