Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom is a 3D platformer openly modelled on the N64 collectathon era — Banjo-Kazooie, Mario 64, the early Crash and Spyro games — with one significant twist: there's no jump button. The protagonist is a yellow taxi rather than a humanoid, and traversal happens through a deep move-set of dashes, flips, ground pounds, ramps and environmental bumps that string together into surprisingly intricate air combos. Spending more time mid-air than on the ground is intentional.

The collectathon side of the design is taken seriously. Hand-crafted retro worlds hide collectibles in obscure, hard-to-reach corners, with material rewards placed in spots so out-of-the-way they border on outside the playable level — the developers actively encourage attempts to break out of bounds, on the grounds that they've put something there for the players who manage it. Move-set mastery and exploration feed into each other across every world, and the difficulty curve rewards experimentation more than it punishes mistakes.

Underneath the platforming is a narrative thread about Granny's Island, where Pizza King, Morio, Ultra Chad and a long roster of openly weird NPCs are gradually revealed to be entangled in a larger conspiracy. The game is the work of two developers, Matteo and Lorenzo, made entirely from scratch as a passion project, and the wholeness of the result — visuals, music, writing, level design all in one voice — reflects that two-person scope rather than fighting it.