Nintendo’s made no secret of the fact that it’s trying to recreate the delights of Mario 64 with Odyssey - but it’s invoking a less obvious influence alongside that Nintendo classic.
The more recent 3D Mario games - Galaxies 1 and 2, and 3D World - have tended to prize challenge, creating short gauntlets themed around occasionally genre-defining design (often throwing those ideas away as soon as they’re done, because there’s something new to concentrate on). Odyssey is not that kind of game. Leisurely, surprising and outwardly comedic (this already feels like the funniest mainline Mario game), Mario’s latest truly is a return to the sandbox style last seen on GameCube.
Every major area I’ve visited is somewhat non-linear in design, allowing you to wander, chat and poke around the darker corners for hidden rewards. I suspect you’ll often end up leaving an area and coming back later, armed not with new abilities, just knowledge about how the designers have slipped things beneath your notice. It quickly becomes as much fun to just look around as it is to complete the quests thrown your way.
The thing is, you could take the entirety of that last paragraph and apply it to a different Nintendo game. As they developed a way to return us to the exploratory style of old, it feels to me as though the Mario team may have been peeking over their cubicles to have a look at how the new Zelda was getting along.
Breath of the Wild is remarkable for many reasons, one of them being how it saturated its world with the promise of secrets and satisfying treats for exploring. Having played around two hours across three new areas - Cap Kingdom, Luncheon Kingdom and Seaside Kingdom - that could end up being Odyssey’s defining trait.
Cap Kingdom - the stunning, almost monochrome world we saw in early trailers - acts as Odyssey’s tutorial area, introducing basic movement, the new Capture mechanic (letting you possess and use the abilities of more or less any enemy that isn’t wearing a hat), not to mention Mario’s quest to stop Bowser’s forcible wedding to Peach - kicked off with a weirdly stirring reason for him to require new companion Cappy.
Luncheon is a bizarre mixture of lava and almost low-poly, technicolour textures - you can ping yourself around town using its living fork inhabitants, and utilise enemies immune to its deadly scenery to stay alive. It also contains the most bizarre capturable item I’ve seen so far - a giant, twitching hunk of meat. Look forward to that. Seaside Kingdom is a tad more relaxing. Its beach resort includes a volleyball minigame (amazingly, this and other games like the skipping rope we saw in New Donk City come with online leaderboards), and its crystal-clear seas are fully explorable with the aid of a captured Cheep Cheep.
All three are gorgeous for entirely separate reasons - and act as further testament to Nintendo’s mastery of art design. Switch doesn’t feel comparatively underpowered when games look this good on it. You can tell the developer’s confident too - Odyssey is the first Mario game with a full Photo Mode. Hit down on the D-Pad and you can pan, zoom, and filter your image, allowing for fantastic screenshots.
What ties them all together is Odyssey’s structure. Each Kingdom is packed with Power Moons that act as fuel to move onto the next. Some of these are tied directly to the story - beating bosses, or reaching obvious points of interest. But the majority are locked behind side-quests, require captured enemies’ abilities, or are simply hidden out of normal line of sight.
In my experience, most of these come with little to no hint of their existence - characters might just look more interesting than others, or an element of scenery out of place. It’s as though the gentle “what if I do this here?” puzzles that rewarded Breath of the Wild’s Korok seeds have drifted across the Nintendo EPD office and planted themselves throughout Odyssey too.
As an example, at one point I spotted a glowing patch of ground. As I walked over it, my Joy-Con began rumbling gently. Then, as I puzzled over it, wondering if I had to land Cappy on it or bring a certain enemy type here, Mario looked down and tapped his foot on the ground. A ground pound revealed an unmarked Power Moon. No text or established mechanic had led me here, just the promise of something shiny - for such a simple action, it felt amazing.
Mario games have always had an eye for a secret, of course - we all remember trying to break a brick block and a coin coming out - but they’ve rarely felt as pervasive, or as much a part of the fabric of the core game. I encountered caves with walls begging to be bounced off of and discovered hidden rooms. Simple signage can turn out to be a map to a hidden Moon. Even playing with a hat-wearing dog in the Seaside Kingdom (try playing fetch with Cappy) saw him barking to alert me to buried coins. Just as Breath of the Wild constantly dragged you off course, Odyssey’s secrets are an intoxicating distraction.
You could even make a case for Odyssey’s hilariously strange Capture mechanic being a riff on BotW’s “chemistry engine”. Zelda challenged you to use the fabric of the world itself (fire, lightning, magnetism) to make your life easier - in Odyssey, it’s your enemies that feel like opportunities to mess with the core experience.
The water-squirting squid of the Seaside Kingdom are most obviously a means for flying - you can have them jet around vertically or horizontally, before leaping out of their bodies onto higher, harder-to-reach ground. But then you realise that same jet of water can cool health-sapping lava, revealing secrets beneath. Captured Hammer Bros are great for clearing an area of enemies (you can throw projectiles as fast as you can hit the button), but they can also chip away at the Luncheon Kingdom’s literally cheesy scenery, revealing hidden objects or entrances.
Whether Odyssey will go as far with the idea as Breath of the Wild remains to be seen - its distinct worlds don’t allow for bringing one enemy type to an entirely different place, and I haven’t seen much evidence of chaining enemy abilities together, for example. What’s clear is that capturing acts as much like a toy as it does a key. Stacking Goombas to impress a lady-Goomba will reward you with a Power Moon, but it’s also straight-up fun to see how many you can get tottering around, before taking on much stronger enemies.
There will no doubt be some who find Odyssey a tad simple. So far, purely skill-based play is sporadic, and I can’t see anything measuring up to the challenge of 3D World’s Champion’s Road, for example. Health is plentiful, and even game overs have been stripped out (instead you lose coins that you can spend on new outfits and items). That’s not really the point, though. Odyssey’s clearly putting a premium on the wonder of discovery, the joy of surprise, the satisfaction of a solution to a puzzle you just think might be there.
If it gets that right, Odyssey might nab one more facet of Breath of the Wild - it’ll be a surefire contender for game of the year.
Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor and he has been smiling for a week. It's agony. Follow him on Twitter.
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