Team17 has announced that it is unveiling two new games next week. As it so happens, the announcement seems to be hinting that Yooka-Laylee 2 is one of these games.
The announcement doesn’t really state anything specific about a Yooka-Laylee sequel: Team17 simply states that it will be revealing two “brand new” games next week. However, the studio also states that it has hidden clues to the identity of the games in the logo image featured on the announcement page. You can see this logo below.
While it’s a bit hard to spot, the background of the “17” in the logo features a honeycomb pattern. Fans of Yooka-Laylee will recall that honeycombs and bees played a large part in that game.
The game featured a anthropomorphic bee, the “crowdfunded corporate creep” Capital B, at its main antagonist. In addition to this, the game’s hub world, Hivory Towers, also featured a honeycomb motif. They honeycomb pattern could be a callback to these. It can certainly be considered cryptic enough, since it doesn’t directly refer to the protagonists, Yooka and Laylee.
Developed by Playtonic and published by Team17, the original Yooka-Laylee features Yooka the chameleon and Laylee the bat trying to recover the magical “One Book” from Capital B. The game had players control both protagonists similar to Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie.
Playtonic and Team17 crowd funded the game through a Kickstarter campaign. At the time, the campaign broke records to become the fastest video game in Kickstarter history to reach $1,000,000.
On top of this, the game actually sold quite well. Yooka-Laylee debuted at number six in the UK sales charts, and number two in Australia. By November of 2018, the game had sold over a million copies.
With this in mind, it’s obvious why Team17 would want to make a sequel to Yooka-Laylee. With how much the original sold, the studio probably won’t even have to crowd fund the sequel this time.