It wasn’t as if the tester was having a bad time. He was a pinball fan, after all. It’s just that every time he tried to reach for his coffee, the intensity of the game he was testing kept pulling his hand back to the controller. Half an hour later, he finished playing, picked up his cold coffee, and said he’d enjoyed the game. As he contentedly walked away, he couldn’t know that he’d brought about a turning point for its developers, who turned to each other and said, ”Did you see what happened there? This is not the game we want to make, right?”

This was the moment that made Villa Gorilla realise their game had lost its way, the moment that led to the game’s transformation into the smart and charming Yoku’s Island Express, a game that mixes platformers, adventuring in a freely explorable world, and pinball.

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