’Super Mario Odyssey’ Is a Surreal, Candy-Colored Triumph

Nintendo has always had a knack for the uncanny. Look closely at most any popular Nintendo series—past the colors and the music and the charming aesthetic—and you'll find something strange. Kirby is a game series about an insatiable, omnivorous, amorphous pink blob with lungs strong enough to suck in trees. In the Metroid franchise, the most frightening, dangerous creatures in the entire galaxy are floating jellyfish who are allergic to the cold. And Mario, of course, is a series about an Italian plumber rampaging boots-first through a technicolor nightmare of Alice in Wonderland mushrooms and murderous turtles on the way to steal your girl.

Super Mario Odyssey, like many of Nintendo's best games, succeeds by virtue of layering on even more of that uncanny sensibility until the whole proceeding feels like a giggling surrealist parlor game. Think the giant, smiling moon in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, or the implied drug trip turned into a real one in Yoshi's Island; working with bizarre, primal images, Nintendo's developers have always been able to build something that feels as if it was destined to exist. Nintendo's gift is not just in producing, as they claim, "gameplay-first fun," but in building that fun out of ideas that should be nightmares.

In Super Mario Odyssey, the first official Super Mario game for the Nintendo Switch, and the first fully-3D Super Mario in seven years, that nightmare is possession. Early in the game, Mario's trademark red cap is fused with a sentient top hat, and Mario gains an eerie power: anything that is made to wear Mario's cap becomes Mario. Throw it on a dinosaur's head, for instance, and that dino is instantly fused with Mario—and you, the player, find yourself playing as a dinosaur. Take control of goombas, electric poles, whatever else suits your fancy. Mario's vision of the future is a cap resting on an enslaved head, forever.