New Super Lucky’s Tale – PS5 Review

We reviewed the PS4 incarnation of this jolly platformer in late August 2020. Eeeh. When lockdowns were loosely interpreted and yer man Rishi Sunak had the Eat Out To Help Out initiative. Seems like a lifetime ago now. Heck, PS5 had yet to be released, but even when it was released the following November, it took a good while before we started to see many indie games coming out on PS5.

So why’s it taken this long for New Super Lucky’s Tale to get a PS5 port when the PS4 version has been around for some time now? We’re not entirely sure to be honest. In fact, when you start the PS5 version, you’re invited to import your PS4 save. This is all well and good, but upon doing so, while progress was imported from when we played, only two trophies of the forty-two we’d previously got showed up. Either this is a pre-release issue or by design, but we can’t verify it either way.

We also can’t verify whether you get access to the PS5 version by being an owner of the PS4 game, but we’d suspect not, by way of the earlier game currently being reduced to £7.49 on the PSN store. Fair enough we suppose, but when the PS5 version is effectively the same game, we have to wonder why, as anyone who played the PS4 edition is unlikely to dip their toe in again. We guess it makes sense for the suits at PQube anyway.

What follows is largely the same review with a few embellishments. Sure, there’s 4K 120Hz in the equation, but we’d expect nothing less than that from a current release.

For anyone that played Donkey Kong 64 or either of the Banjo Kazooie games on N64 (or latterly on 360), the structure will be largely familiar to you. A hub area with levels accessible within it. In addition, NSLT throws in extra puzzle levels, all of which add up to your unlocking the portal to the next area upon beating a boss.

The main villain of the piece is Jinx, a cat that’s a bit of a twat, just like cats are in reality. It’s down to you to defeat his lieutenants in turn, the first of which, Mittens is a pest to the denizens of Sky Castle. There soon follows a bunch of levels in that hub, most of which are 3D platform stages. As you progress, you’ll encounter forced perspective pseudo-2D levels. More often than not, you can play them at your own pace, but occasionally they’re auto-runners penned ‘dungeon runs’.

All the levels, barring the one-shot puzzles in ‘foxholes’, have four Tale pages to unlock. One for beating the level, another for reaching three hundred coins, a third for spelling out L U C K Y by collecting individual letters and finally, a secret extra page usually unlocked by completing a puzzle inside the level. Generally, you won’t have a great deal of trouble unlocking most of these on the first pass, though the Lucky letters might evade you.

It’s here that a bugbear of ours comes to the fore. If you go back to a level and fulfil the criteria for a page, say the L of Lucky, you won’t be able to save and quit. Nor will you be able to go to the next checkpoint and quit after it’s saved your progress. This isn’t so bad early on when you’re collecting the extra currency to unlock new costumes in the shop within each hub. But when the levels get ever more complicated and multi-staged, it becomes something of a chore. It was an annoyance in 2020 and remains the case today.

The puzzles we mentioned earlier are either pushing block or tilt puzzles. The former are fairly straightforward for the most part, only really becoming mildly challenging once you get to the fourth hub anyway. To be honest, only those out for a platinum trophy are likely to go for them all anyway.

Back when we played this in 2020, the then six-year-old in residence liked what he played but found some of the collectibles a little beyond his comprehension. No bad thing as it allows for parents (aka us) to help out if their kid is vexed. But for the most part, all but the very youngest kids will be fine with this due to the fairly relaxed page limits to unlock the next hub. We were able to speed through the storyline without clearing out all of the levels for pages due to these relaxed requirements.

As we alluded to with the foxholes, there’s fox themed puns a plenty. Our kid thought New Super Lucky’s Tale was the absolute height of sophisticated comedy what with the double phonetic meaning. We just groaned for the most part.

At the outset you get a trophy from watching the introductory cutscene.  It’s the first of many trophies that you’ll be showered with at before they slow to a relative trickle. Each hub has an associated trophy for getting all the pages within, they’re a fair challenge especially with the Lucky letters within each stage.

The plot is a fairly well-worn template, but it’s fun enough, especially for younger players. More foxy puns at least. Notably all the cutscenes are done in-engine, with subtitled text from the Simlish-sounding speech, such as it is. The worm NPCs sound a bit like them despicable minions too.

The tilt-controlled puzzle levels are back, only they seem to be tougher than they were with a Dualshock 4. Perhaps the tilt function is less well implemented on PS5. To the extent that we burned through twenty-three extra lives we’d accumulated until one tilt level. So not great. The 4K that we’re able to see and the 120Hz we’re not due to our HDMI 2.0 set are welcome additions, though we struggle to see how it uses DualSense particularly.

Any shortcomings are generally overcome by the fact that this is a very polished experience and that Playful have clearly refined New Super Lucky’s Tale to be a great example of the 3D platformer that harks back to the genre’s heyday. Though why we’re now not reviewing New Super Lucky’s Tale 2 is another question.