Focus Entertainment and developer Mad About Pandas have unveiled Yerba Buena, a puzzle platformer set inside an abandoned gameworld modelled on 1970s San Francisco. The game launches May 26, 2026 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
Barb is a young woman who exists as an NPC, a background character in a world that was never built around her. The city she calls home, a surreal recreation of San Francisco, has been left behind by whatever players or creators once populated it. Now that city faces a threat on two fronts: a dangerous gang of bikers with superpowers and a mysterious glitch spreading further through the streets each day. Barb was never meant to be the main character, but with the help of her friends Russell, Wanda, Jorge and some unlikely allies, she sets out to uncover the truth and save San Francisco from greed and destruction.
The tool that makes any of this possible is the Oscillator, a device that lets Barb copy the movement and physical traits of objects in the world and reapply them elsewhere. This is the game's central mechanic, a "Copy and Paste" system that treats the environment as something to be broken apart and reassembled. Copy the bounce of a trampoline and give it to a table. Hurl entire buildings across city blocks. Turn solid walls into thin air. The logic is consistent with the premise: Barb lives inside a game, so the rules of that game are hers to bend. Every puzzle in Yerba Buena is built around this idea, asking players to look at the physical properties of what's around them and imagine those properties applied somewhere else entirely.
There's something pointed about the setup. Barb isn't a chosen one or a hero with a destiny. She's an NPC, someone the system was designed to overlook, struggling to find her way in a city that wasn't made for her. The threat to San Francisco isn't just the glitch or the biker gang but the greed behind whatever sinister plot connects them. Becoming the main character you were never meant to be isn't just a tagline here. It's the friction the whole game is built around, the tension between who the world says you are and what you choose to do about it.
The setting leans into its own artificiality. This is a gameworld, and it knows it. The 1970s San Francisco aesthetic gives it a specific visual identity, but the surreal layer on top, where buildings can be flung and walls can vanish, keeps reminding you that none of this is meant to feel real. It's a place where the rules were always arbitrary, and the Oscillator just makes that visible.
Yerba Buena is being developed by Mad About Pandas and published by Focus Entertainment. The bikers have superpowers, the city is glitching apart, and the woman trying to hold it all together was never supposed to matter. She has a device that can copy the physics of a trampoline and paste them onto a wall, and that's going to have to be enough.