Yerba Buena

I went into Yerba Buena expecting a Portal-adjacent curiosity from a small Berlin studio, and in its first few hours it delivers exactly that warm, slightly-off-kilter rush of a game that knows exactly what strange thing it wants to be. You play as Barb, an NPC inside an abandoned, glitch-riddled video game version of 1970s San Francisco, who stumbles onto a cassette-tape-powered radar gun called the Oscillator after her taxi-driver friend Russell is kidnapped by a biker gang called the Bay Angels. The meta setup, where Barb is literally a character inside a decaying, unupdated game world, turns out to be doing real narrative work rather than just being a quirky backdrop. Snippets of developer audio logs slowly reveal a deeper story about greed and the cost of creation that quietly earns its weirdness over the course of the roughly ten-hour campaign. The Oscillator is the whole game, and it is genuinely inventive. You scan the environment to identify yellow objects that carry movement or physical traits and blue objects that can absorb them. Early puzzles ask you to copy the left-right drift of a passing car and paste it onto a glitched housing block so you can ride it like a platform. Later, you unlock bounce, gas (which turns solid walls intangible), and a sticky honey layer, and the game starts asking you to stack and sequence these properties in specific orders while navigating bottomless pits and laser grids. The amusement park sequences, where a hippie couple curates gauntlet challenges to teach each new Oscillator ability, are among the most satisfying tutorial rooms I have encountered in the genre: compact, themed, and genuinely fun rather than obligatory. Sending an entire apartment building sliding across a city block never stops feeling a little absurd in the best way. The friction is real, though, and worth knowing before you commit. The first-person perspective can work against you on trickier puzzles, where spatial awareness under time pressure becomes genuinely clunky. The Oscillator requires you to aim precisely at objects, which is harder on a controller than a mouse, and the game does not store your copied trait between scans, so you are frequently returning to re-acquire the same movement source mid-puzzle. Loading screens intrude mid-cutscene, and some late-game levels drag past the point where their puzzles justify the runtime. Reviewers have noted the puzzle logic occasionally tips from challenging into opaque, where the solution feels less discovered than stumbled upon. The character writing does not always land either: Barb is likeable but most of her supporting cast is thinly sketched, and the emotional stakes stay a little too abstract for the story to fully land its punches. Where the game quietly succeeds is in its environmental handcraft. The stylised 1970s San Francisco palette, all warm oranges and faded municipal greens, gives the puzzle spaces real texture. The amusement park levels in particular are a standout in level design, wacky and spatially inventive in ways that made me slow down and look. Mad About Pandas previously made Hitchhiker - A Mystery Game, and that instinct for mood and atmosphere is visible here too: Yerba Buena has a specific feeling, somewhere between a forgotten cop drama and a lucid dream, that lingers after the credits. It is not a game that fully solves all of its own puzzles, so to speak, but the idea at the center of it is worth experiencing for anyone who has been waiting for something to scratch that physics-puzzle itch that the Portal lineage left behind. Kai, Scout Team