There’s an easy grace available to you in Yoku’s Island Express. Steer the main character onto any of the pinball flippers embedded in the floors and walls and you can punt him into the air as predictably as a jump in any other platformer. Use those paddles to aim Yoku into one of the other pinball-inspired mechanisms, however, and the game takes hold, shooping Yoku and the ball through tunnels at high speed, or smoothly rolling it down paths littered with objects that spin and shimmer. This grace is something I’ve never experienced when playing an actual pinball table, and it made my time with Yoku a delight. (more…)