Super Mario Odyssey
If there is a single certainty in gaming, it’s that when Nintendo makes a Mario platformer, chances are it’s going to be great.
Which is why going into my hands-on of its first dedicated Nintendo Switch flagship, Mario Odyssey, I had pretty high expectations most games would have chance of meeting. Despite this, after 20 minutes with two of the game’s levels, somehow Mario Odyssey managed to exceed all of them.
Starting off with the basic facts: Odyssey is a more open game than Nintendo’s past Mario adventures over the last couple of years that follows a an open world exploration format similar to Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine.
It features the same iconic platforming, mini games and charming visuals you’d expect from the iconic series, but comes with an added twist – you can throw his hat.
In this all-new adventure your favourite plumber can be a flagpole, a fire hydrant and a dinosaur. And that's just what we've seen so far of this Switch game’s delirious charms. An open world platformer that's every bit as ambitious as Zelda: Breath of the Wild, we really can't wait to play it in full when it hits stores in just a few months time.
Not got a Switch yet? This could be all the excuse you need.
The general thrust of Super Mario Odyssey's story is similar to most Mario games. Bowser abducted Princess Peach and Mario has to save her. This time he's assisted by a magic hat named Cappy, and flies in a hat-shaped spaceship called the Odyssey between different worlds. Well, Cappy isn't just a hat. He's a ghost hat that gives Mario magic powers; his "normal" form is a floating white top hat with eyes, and he seemed to simply possess Mario's red hat, replacing the trademark M on the front with those same eyes.
This remains the case with Odyssey’s hat mechanics. At a basic level you can use the hat to attack enemies using the Joypad motion controls. These include throwing your hat forwards, spinning it round you and lobbing it pretty much any way you want. But what makes it ingenious is how Nintendo has integrated it with the game’s platforming sections.
So you're probably wondering how the hell a dungaree-revivalist can assume the form of a dinosaur? Through the help of a magic, eyeballed hat called Cappy, of course. As if there would be any other answer.
Just fling Cappy at your chosen object, inanimate or not, and there's a fair old chance Mario’s consciousness will subsume it. In a totally non-creepy way. Every controllable object gets a Mario-style hat, eyes and moustache, and in the brief time we spent with Odyssey this visage rarely proved anything thing less than hilarious.
There is a point to this incongruous approach to exploration, and it’s to make Mario seem new again. As much as we’ve never seen Nintendo’s greatest creation roam around on an enormous scale before, you could pretty much imagine how that might go were this game set in Mushroom Kingdom again. Instead you’re tasked with traversing skyscrapers of New Donk City or uncovering the desert sprawl of the Sand Kingdom, and initially have no idea how to interact with their many landmarks and citizens.
The only way to make sense of it all? Fling your hat at everything that moves and plenty that doesn’t. With this simple mechanic the old rules of Mario have been totally rewritten, just as Breath of the Wild tossed aside a load of old Zelda conventions without a second thought. Even if Odyssey turns out to be more Super Mario Sunshine than Galaxy, you still have to admire its chutzpah.
Cappy is more than just Mario's guide through Super Mario Odyssey. The ghost hat has plenty of useful tricks up his neck to help Mario out. He can be flung like a boomerang, tossed out a short distance by Mario to hit enemies or float around Mario protectively. Cappy can also float in place when he's tossed out, providing a bouncy platform for Mario to jump on. If these were the only things Cappy could do, he'd already be a fairly useful addition to the game and serve the same role as the F.L.U.D.D. backpack in Super Mario Sunshine for giving Mario maneuverability and offensive options. But that isn't enough for Cappy.
Cappy can possess things. Rather, Cappy can let Mario possess things. Flinging Cappy into certain objects and characters puts Mario's hat on them and causes them to sprout a mustache, indicating that you now control whatever Cappy sits on. Possessing a Bullet Bill flying at you lets lets you control that Bullet Bill and steer him in different directions to cross gaps Mario can't jump across on his own. Possessing a generator lets you zip along power lines. You can even possess certain human beings, like I did in New Donk City to use a bystander's remote control car to find a collectible item hidden behind a fence.
Playing the demo’s opening desert level, I was free to hunt for Moons – which act as the fuel you use to fuel the spaceship that carries you between areas.
Spotting a hefty looking mountain in the distance I decided to start there. The climb was full of switches, levers, moving platforms and pretty much all the gubbins you’d expect from Mario and was a blast to hop, skip and triple-jump through.
Not everything is possessable by Cappy. Flinging Cappy at Goombas simply hurt them instead of controlling them, and objects like question mark blocks, crosswalk lights, and trash cans simply gave me coins rather than turned me into a literal trash man. Cappy's powers seem to be fairly limited and specific, with possession serving as a tool to augment Mario's usual platforming and puzzle-solving abilities rather than replace them.
Besides cap-tossing and erratic object-possessing, Mario moves and acts similar to how he does in other 3D Mario games like Super Mario 3D World. His punch has been replaced by his Cappy throw, but Mario can still jump around, double- and triple-jump to reach higher platforms, and both slide down and kick off of walls. He isn't quite Spider-Man, but he can move.
The best part of the demo was waiting for me at the top of the mountain, however. Near the peak I was confronted with a giant chasm with a Moon on the other side. The distance between me and the Moon was well outside of Mario's normal jump distance and there were no clear platforms or walls for me to vault off.
With giant Bullet Bills circling, in a moment of panic I sent my hat flying with a flick of the wrist. Turns out if your hat collides with a character, Bullet or otherwise, you can take control of it. I duly did, and navigated it across the chasm to pick up a Moon.
Traveling back to the city world, my joy continued as Nintendo’s painstaking, loving attention to detail shone through pretty every aspect of the level design. The level was full of hidden platforms, scalable skyscrapers and odes to Nintendo fans. After just 20 minutes, I want more.
While Cappy is by far most noticeable introduction to Odyssey there’s plenty more about it that’s different. Mushrooms are no longer used to power-up your health, costumes can be bought with the coins you collect and you quests are handed to you by various denizens of the game. Also, did we mention the dinosaur thing? It’s kind of a big deal.
Crucially, there’s still enough of the old Mario games in Odyssey to ensure you’re not completely bamboozled by it. Anyone who’s played his recent 3D World or Galaxy outings will be familiar with both his controls and impossibly acrobatic move-set. That’s not to say Princess Peach’s protector doesn’t have a few new tricks up his sleeve. He can now roll into a ball and spin along a level, as well as use Cappy to traverse across chasms and slay Goombas for good measure.
Odyssey gives you all the means rule supreme over its many worlds, however unfamiliar they may seem at first. And that’s what makes its many challenges fun, at least from what we’ve played so far.
The demo took me through sections of two worlds, a desert-themed area and a city-themed area (the fabled New Donk City of the original Super Mario Odyssey trailer). I started in New Donk City, where the Odyssey landed in an empty lot and I was given the direction to meet with Mayor Pauline (who long-time Mario fans will recognize as Mario's original damsel in distress from Donkey Kong). She stood a distance away, in front of City Hall. Instead of running to her, I got distracted by the many, many different things I could see and do in the city.
Electrical generators near buildings let me reach their roofs and go sightseeing, collecting both standard gold mario coins and special world-specific purple coins in the process. A man with a remote control car let me play with his car after I possessed him with my ghost hat, which revealed a moon collectible that seems to serve the same progression-granting role as shine sprites and stars in other 3D Mario games. A pipe connected to a wall tagged with 8-bit graffitti sent me into that wall, where I played through a short 2D platforming section reminiscent of the original Super Mario Bros. I even hung out with some dapper-looking buskers on the street.
The buskers seem to serve a short-term purpose in the game's plot, since as soon as I finally met with Mayor Pauline she asked me to find four musicians to prepare for some festivities. I only found one musician before the New Donk city section of the demo ended, but it gave me another moon.
Even in our brief time with Odyssey, we found loads Power Moons scattered around New Donk City. From secret levels below manholes to the top of the Empire State Building, this game makes a great effort to reward your curiosity and the same went for our time in the sunny climes of the Sand Kingdom. That you can go from playing an 8-bit, 2D side-scrolling section to leaping about on a Sphinx-like taxi called a Jaxi in the space of a minute speaks volumes of the creativity that’s been crammed into the game.
Better still, each world we delved into had its own unique art style and challenges. Rather than sticking to the usual formula of fire world, ice world, water world, it seems as though Nintendo has done its utmost to break conventions and confound expectations. Having gone into our time with Odyssey with some degree of suspicion how everything would fit together, we came out of it wanting to see just how ludicrous it might get.
If making a new kind of Mario game after three decades seems like an impossible task, then Odyssey makes that challenge look easy through sheer force of inventiveness. Who knows whether it’ll all hang together come October 27, but for now we’re delighted with how unexpected the whole thing proved to be.
The worst Marios of recent time have been content to rely on an inspiring cocktail of nostalgia and formula. Odyssey sees such a routine as an affront to fun: it’s big and risky and creative. Even that doesn’t all add up to great game in the end, we can’t help but applaud Nintendo’s intentions.
A hat store in New Donk City gave me the option to spend gold coins and purple currency. Gold coins can be collected anywhere, but purple currency is specific to each world. For New Donk City it's purple coins, but the desert world has purple triangles. I could spend the gold coins on power-ups for Mario, like a heart that doubled his life meter, or on cosmetic items. I fittted Mario with a dapper black suit and a matching black fedora (which get eyes as soon as Cappy possessed it) and went out on the town. Suited Mario played exactly the same as overall-wearing Mario, but I really liked the new look.
The purple currency seems to be much more special. I didn't have enough purple coins to buy anything in that section, but I saw options to get an orange construction outfit from Super Mario Maker and a handful of models and statues. Whether the construction outfit gives Mario any extra abilities remains to be seen, but the models and statues appear to be decorations you can place on the Odyssey between adventures. Between the statues and the suits, Super Mario Odyssey seems to offer the most cosmetic customization options of any main series Mario game.
Super Mario Odyssey is a very strange game in a very strange series, and I can't wait to see more of it. The addition of a ghost hat that lets you possess different things adds a lot of potential for puzzles and gameplay, and the open structure of each world calls back to games like Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine. We'll see just how big Mario's adventure turns out to be when Super Mario Odyssey comes out in October.
