Summer Game Fest 2026 is happening this week, and while that usually means we can ready ourselves for plenty of surprise video game reveals, invariably not everything will manage to stay a secret until its big day. And it looks like developer Playtonic’s Yooka-Laylee series is the latest to get leaky, with a Yooka-Laylee kart racer seemingly coming soon.
An entry for a Super Yooka-Laylee Kart – which would mark the chameleon and bat duo’s fourth video game adventure, if you count last year’s remake – has been spotted on SteamDB (thanks Gematsu). The page – actually meant for a playtest – includes key art, full of vehicular chaos, strongly suggesting Super Yooka-Laylee Kart is exactly what it sounds like. That’s alongside asset uploads of a header, capsule, and library images.
You’d expect this means an official announcement is coming soon (potentially even this week), especially given that Playtonic has been teasing a reveal of something new over the past few days. “Collecting quills is far too slow, there may be faster ways to go…”, it wrote on social media, before promising fans “it’ll all make sense soon”.
On paper, the idea of a kart racing spin-off for Yooka-Laylee seems like a no-brainer, and is firmly in keeping with the series’ tradition of honouring video game classics – even if the jump from a platformer to a racer is a big one.
Initial fan reactions seem to be divided though. Over on the Yooka-Laylee subreddit, some users are excited to see the series expand into a different genre, while others are a little disappointed that it’s seemingly moving away from its platforming roots. “It just seems odd that seven years on from Impossible Lair we’ve gotten a re-release of Yooka Laylee with some solid but pretty low effort additional content and now apparently a kart racer”, one poster wrote.
Yooka-Laylee debuted in 2016 as a 3D platformer that aimed to keep the tradition of oldies like Banjo-Kazooie alive, while Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair opted for a side-scrolling approach reminiscent of Donkey Kong Country. Last year, an upgraded version of the original arrived through Yooka-Replaylee. Could Playtonic still be planning a new 3D entry on top of Super Yooka-Laylee Kart? Time will tell.
