You run and jump through bright little worlds, a big city full of taxis, a desert of pink sand, a kingdom made of food, looking for glowing moons hidden in every corner. Your hat is your main tool, and throwing it onto an enemy lets you take over its body, so you can stomp around as a dinosaur or swim as a fish. It is cheerful, easy to pick up, and throws a new surprise at you every couple of minutes.
Gameplay video
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Screenshots & review notes
Overall
This is 3D Mario at its most inventive in years, packed with ideas that most games would save for a finale and Nintendo just tosses out casually.
Moment to moment
Cappy's possession mechanic constantly reinvents the moment-to-moment platforming, keeping momentum high even as difficulty stays gentle for most of the campaign.
Art and atmosphere
Each kingdom has its own distinct visual identity and jazzy theme, and the whole thing runs buttery smooth in both docked and handheld modes.
Worth your time?
Post-game moons push completionists toward genuine challenge, and the pure joy of movement makes this one of the easiest platformers to recommend to any age.
Frames captured from the gameplay video above; notes are our own take on the game.
What it's like to play
You control Mario running and jumping around bright, chunky 3D worlds, and each one looks nothing like the last. One is a busy realistic city with yellow taxis and skyscrapers, another is a desert of pink sand, another is a kingdom made entirely of food where the locals are forks. Moving feels great on its own, you can roll, dive, long jump, and bounce off walls, and just messing around with the controls in an open field is satisfying before you even do anything.
Your hat is the twist. Throw it at almost any creature or object and you take over its body. Land it on a Goomba and you are a Goomba who can stack other Goombas. Land it on a frog and you jump twice as high. Land it on a giant T-Rex and you stomp through boulders. Land it on a flying fireball and you swim through lava. Each world introduces a few of these, teaches you what they do without a tutorial, and then builds little challenges around them.
What you collect are glowing moons, and they are hidden absolutely everywhere, behind waterfalls, under manhole covers, on rooftops, and handed out for winning footraces or feeding a hungry goomba. Because they are so plentiful you are never more than a minute or two from a reward, which keeps things moving. The main story is short and gentle, twelve to fifteen hours, and young kids can finish it. After the credits the game unlocks hundreds more moons and some genuinely brutal jumping challenges for people who want a real test. A second person can control the hat if you want to play together on the couch.