Kirby’s Epic Yarn

The most inspired twists come when Kirby metamorphoses into one of his countless alter egos. The game often changes along with the hero, so for instance, when he becomes a dune buggy, the level seamlessly turns into a fast-paced off-road rally. Likewise, Dolphin Kirby has to out-swim a speedy woollen angler-fish through a narrow obstacle course. These quicker stretches provide a welcome complement to the game's usual lazy rhythm.

Not all of Kirby's alternate forms hit the mark. His appearance as a train, which requires the player to draw "tracks" on the screen with the Wiimote, is an awkward exercise that feels like nothing more than an attempt to justify the Wii's motion-sensing technology. In fact, with just a few tweaks, the entire game could easily work with the Classic Controller. Epic Yarn instead toes the Nintendo company line, which maintains that holding the Wiimote sideways is an acceptable configuration, despite its too-small directional pad and ungainly candy-bar shape.

The co-op mode, though, shows that the Epic Yarn team was willing to learn from Nintendo's past mistakes. In any stage, two people can play together (locally) on the same screen as Kirby and Prince Fluff. Each character has essentially the same freedom and abilities. In certain sections, the game merges the team into one unit and splits the control scheme between the two controllers, forcing you to co-ordinate your moves. Team play rarely suffers from the claustrophobia that plagued New Super Mario Bros. Wii, nor is the second player a vestigial appendage as in the Super Mario Galaxy series.

Epic Yarn doesn't have the aural pleasures to match its eye candy. Each stage has its music track stashed away somewhere as a hidden treasure – if you find the tiny felt CD, you can listen to it again later. The tunes are too innocuous, though, for this to serve as an enticing reward.

A home-decoration side game is another non-starter. You can fill Kirby's flat with little items of furniture you find during your quest, but this poor man's Animal Crossing is a diversion only for the easily amused.

The game that kept coming to mind as I played through Kirby's Epic Yarn was not any of the past Kirby entries, but rather Little Nemo The Dream Master, an NES game from 1990. Both titles featured fantastical settings with loveable heroes who could take on a variety of new forms. (Some of Nemo's magical costumes included a gorilla and a hermit crab.)

Little Nemo, however, was a notoriously challenging game (even by the standards of the NES era), while Kirby's Epic Yarn rolls out its embroidered welcome mat to every calibre of player. That ultra-accessibility does mean that there are points where the game flirts with monotony, as the basic push-and-pull of the action doesn't evolve too much from start to finish. The flip side is that practically anyone can pore over every stitch of Patch World – and it's a visual masterpiece that will reward the attention.