The goal in each level is to get to the golden star at the end, and there are always three optional gems to collect for an additional challenge. In order to get him through each stage, you need to rotate the camera and view the tiny world from every angle to find the optimal path through. He can walk and pick up a few objects, but that’s about it. Each level is a tiny, self-contained world, like a digital diorama. On the surface, it looks like a platformer, a classic 3D adventure starring one of Nintendo’s lesser-known characters. It’s giving great games a second life, and perhaps none deserve that spotlight as much as Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker.įirst released on the Wii U back in 2014, Captain Toad is an odd little game. Slowly, the company has been porting the best releases to its new tablet. While the Wii U was far from successful commercially, it was the home to some of Nintendo’s most inventive games ever. For Captain Toad, the trip itself is the treasure.The failure of the Wii U has been a boon for the Nintendo Switch. At no point in any of these modes does Toad’s inability to jump feel like a handicap, but rather as a reminder of how nice it is to take the longer, more scenic route. Each presents a more challenging objective to complete, as well as a time trial, and there’s also a Where’s Waldo-like alternative for each course in which players track down a tiny, pixelated Toad. There’s always some new trick to master, whether it’s avoiding thin ice by following a bunch of Biddybuds or launching yourself into a giant pachinko machine.Įven replays of the same level offer new surprises. For example, Toad must stun Boos with his headlamp (a mechanic cribbed from Luigi’s Mansion) while also moving the various doors of a ghost house into alignment, as if playing with some sort of spectral Rubik’s cube.Įach level might not always offer something entirely new, like the underwater section of the Briny Bowl Swimming Hole or the transparent pipe maze of the Clear Pipe Puzzleplex, but even each of the three encounters with the smoke-spewing volcano Draggadons offers some newly devious twist, like having to manually rotate walls into position that’ll serve as temporary shields. And most levels are a perfect mix of the old and new. And while Captain Toad draws from the richness of the Super Mario series’s history, featuring appearances from everything from Goombas to the Conkdors first seen in Super Mario 3D World, it boasts its own inventions, like the spectral Mummy-Me version of your character that appears in bonus levels and forces you to keep moving. There are over 70 miniature stages to complete, each no more than five minutes in length (once you know what you’re doing). Not that Captain Toad is reliant on Super Mario Odyssey to prove its bona fides. Elsewhere, when Toad travels through the waterfalls and fossilized cliffs of the Cascade Kingdom via minecart, the on-rails experience is reminiscent of the way in which Pokémon Snap expanded on Pokémon Red and Blue, showcasing familiar environments in a new way. Instead of navigating all of New Donk City, Toad visits a densely packed one-block-wide version of the metropolis that has you relive key portions of Mario’s journey, such as turning the power on in the sewers.
Instead of facing a Cookatiel head-on, Toad slaloms through a fiery labyrinth behind the enemy. This is most obvious in the four bonus stages from Super Mario Odyssey that are new to this Switch edition. The things that Toad can’t do never hold him back from clambering past the same enemies Mario might simply leap around they just force players to do so in creative ways. And because Toad can’t jump, players must often trick enemies like the football helmet-wearing Chargin’ Chucks that first made their appearance in Super Mario World into dismantling obstacles, or find turnips for Toad to throw into foes or out-of-reach items (an obvious nod to Super Mario Bros. It’s fitting that, four years after releasing on the Wii U, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is enjoying a second life on the Switch: The majority of the game’s clever puzzles revolve around shifting our sense of perspective, and isn’t it a port’s job to give players a chance to see an old title in a new light? Indeed, the Switch delivers Captain Toad in a higher-resolution format, and with better gyroscopic controls-for when you’re playing on a television and need to point at an object with a Joy-Con in order to activate it.īecause Captain Toad is slow, players can tap, and as such stun, enemies in order to avoid coming into contact with them.
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