Yep, a few great things so far:
- No time limits or auto scroll (at least in the levels I've seen so far) to worry about. Each level is a mini open world and there is no pressure to reach the end. This actually gives the freedom to explore.
- The collectible NPCs are actually used to team up with in the crash site, and it's possible to find them accessories too. Compared to the "Yoshi's Woolly World", which is also a platform about rescuing lost buddies, there are more incentives to save them all beyond 100%-ing the game.
- Non-collectible NPCs are fun too! It's worth interacting with the rich environment, even if sometimes having so many things moving around makes it harder to distinguish between foes and harmless NPCs.
- No life bar and plenty of re-spawn points. Cherry on top, every special item acquired between respawn points is kept. So players are free to take any risk to try to grab special coins or whatever without worrying about having to redo a large part of the level if that doesn't go as planned.
- Hidden areas to discover, levers to activate, things to explode, etc... the environment has a large interaction potential.
- Nice diversity of gaming mechanics using most of the features of the console (including blowing into the controller!). To compare to the Yoshi game again, the goal there was just always to hit things with a ball of yarn. Very repetitive after some time...