Toads — for years Mario’s oddly-named little mushroom-headed buddies — have been trundling along, playing a not-particularly high profile, but nonetheless important role in the Mushroom Kingdom. I’m pretty sure no other characters (or character? Are they a hive mind?) have appeared in more games without actually starring in one, but that all changes now. If you’re being ungenerous, the fact that Nintendo has finally given the toads their own game in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker could be seen as the ultimate act of desperation by a company barely clinging to the rocks, but you could also look at it as the ultimate show of confidence. What other company would be brave (or crazy) enough to publish a game this cute and brazenly against trend in 2014? Whatever Nintendo’s motivation, let me assure you, they’ve cooked up up one hell of a little adventure for their newest and most unlikely of heroes.
Captain Toad made his playable debut in last year’s Super Mario 3D World in a series of bonus stages that were, for me and many other players, the highlight of a great game. The goal of the stages was to pilot Captain Toad, who can’t jump, move particularly fast or really do much of anything aside from yank things out of the ground, through diorama-like worlds so small they could fit fully on a single screen with room to spare. The hook is that the right stick doesn’t rotate the camera around your avatar as it would in most 3D games — instead it rotates the entire stage, which you have to do constantly to find obscured pathways and secrets only visible from certain angles. It’s a clever, yet humble conceit – the Captain Toad stages were always engaging, but never overly mind-bending or frustrating.
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker transforms the concept into a full retail release, expanding the six-or-so stages from Super Mario 3D World to more than 60. The size of the stages have been plumped up too – while a good portion of them still fit on a single screen, some particularly sprawling worlds might take up three or four screens (or more) worth of real estate. Each stage now also has three hidden gems to collect, encouraging players to twist and turn the world inside out to find every single nook and cranny.
This is not the kind of place a guy who can’t jump should be hanging out.
Our friend the Cap’n hasn’t upgraded his abilities much (or at all) since we last saw him, but the game does give him more opportunity to use his plucking skillz – Mario 2-style turnips are now common, and you’ll actually find yourself inflicting a surprising amount of carnage on unfortunate goombas, shy guys and even hammer bros. throughout your adventure. Speaking of which, in between the puzzle-oriented stages, which are still the meat and potatoes of the game, Nintendo mixes in some surprisingly action-oriented challenges. At various points Captain Toad will find himself rushing over collapsing blocks, battling troops of enemies and taking on massive bosses like he was one of those mustachioed plumber guys. The game even includes simple, kid-friendly first-person shooter segments, in which you use the Wii U GamePad to fire off turnips at baddies. These more action-heavy sections aren’t as strong as the puzzle-focused stages, and it might have been nice if Nintendo had melded the action and puzzling together a little more, but ultimately the more adventuresome stages are usually a nice breather from the more pokey nature of the rest of the game.
Ohhhh yeah mother-effers, playable Toadette. You need this game now.
Ultimately though, Captain Toad gets by largely on charm. Charm is an underrated quality in modern video games, with most titles seemingly being in a competition to see who can be darkest, ugliest and most depressing, but Treasure Tracker is dripping with charm. The game infuses every one of its tiny Mighty Max/Polly Pocket worlds with countless delightful touches and details. You want to collect this game’s worlds and keep them on a well-dusted shelf somewhere. The game even makes Toad and Toadette (who you play as roughly half the time) super appealing. I can’t say I’ve ever had much of an opinion either way on Toad, and Toadette has always come off as a somewhat half-assed attempt to fill out the rosters of Mario’s various sports and karting games, but here they’re both adorable as sh*t. Also appealing is the fact that this game seems to take place in a somewhat out of the way corner of the Mario universe, and thus doesn’t feature Bowser, Princess Peach or the usual overly familiar cast of characters. Yes, a Mario universe game with a new top villain – who’d have thought it was possible?
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker isn’t a huge game – you should be able to beat it in around five hours, and 100% it in a little over 10, but really, that feels like just the right size for a little guy like Captain Toad. A budget $40 price tag also helps relieve any sting you might feel from the game’s relatively brief length.
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is about the best answer possible for why Nintendo needs to stay in the hardware game. If Nintendo was punching it out in the cutthroat world of third-party publishing, a game like this simply wouldn’t and couldn’t be made. Treasure Tracker is what happens when a console maker says “Y’know what? We have this machine, we can put anything we want on it, so let’s forget what everybody else wants for a minute, and just make something we’d like to play.”
Thankfully it turns out Nintendo has pretty good taste in video games (shocking, I know) — you can tell they mostly made this game for their own satisfaction, but I was more than satisfied with it myself. If you’re okay with taking your gaming in a smaller, gentler direction for a few hours, I imagine you’ll be pretty satisfied by Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker too, so get ready for adventure!