Focus Entertainment and Mad About Pandas present Yerba Buena, a first-person puzzle and platformer title for PC and next-generation consoles. We embody Barb, an NPC who lives in an abandoned simulation of 1970s San Francisco. To save her city from a glitch, she will use an Oscillator, a device that allows copying and pasting physical properties between objects, creating ingenious solutions.
The Oscillator mechanic and its environmental integration 🧩
The core of the game lies in the Oscillator, a tool that scans an attribute of an object, such as elasticity or weight, and applies it to another. This transforms the environment into a set of modifiable pieces. The developers note that the challenge is in designing puzzles that require logically combining properties within the world's physics, promoting direct experimentation with the scenario.
When your table is a trampoline and the bikers are the least of your problems 😅
In a plot twist, the existential threat is a glitch, something that Barb, as an NPC, should be quite accustomed to. While investigating a biker gang, she can stop to give the buoyancy of a life preserver to a car. It's the typical day where saving virtual reality involves juggling the laws of physics that someone forgot to debug.