I've been playing Super Mario Bros. Wonder for about a week now, and my head is full of it. What's more - and slightly less convenient - is that my house is full of it too. I'll play and make a note about something incredible but then I'll move on, play somewhere else, make another note, move on again. And all of this brings us today. Let me look around. Stuck to the back of a shirt in the closet is a Post-it with "Platforms of Doom!" written on it. Down by the cactus lamp is a piece of paper talking about Ice Block Tennis. Two pages of my diary are filled with huge letters spelling Young's modulus. What to make of it?
Let's make something of all that first. Platforms of Doom! is my reaction to a level in which the enemies are birds, and the birds shoot projectiles that are dangerous, but which also stick in walls and telescope out to become platforms. A game about jumping and avoiding deadly things is suddenly a game in which you need to avoid deadly things until they suddenly become very useful when it comes to jumping. Mobius Mario! Platforms of Doom!
Ice Block Tennis. This was a discovery from an early level in which you face small enemies with largish boots. It's a frozen level and I was slipping around and having fun and I didn't pay enough attention to those small enemies and their boots at all. That's until they started kicking ice blocks at me, and I discovered I had to knock the ice blocks away or be fatally crushed. Serve and return! Ice Block Tennis!
Young's modulus. Okay, this is a reach and rather pretentious, but I was talking to a developer once about the way they measure the way a balloon, say, deforms when you squeeze it. Surface area and tension and where does everything go and all that jazz. He told me - might have this wrong, it's been a while - that it was all governed by something called Young's modulus. And this is everywhere in Mario Wonder, because it's all about squeezing things, squishing things, popping stuff, bursting stuff. It's Mario but it's also slime YouTube videos, squishee reviews, people mucking about with kinetic sand.
Actually, let's get this out of the way here. Super Mario Wonder is all about a lot of stuff. It's endless variety. It has themes, but lots of themes, too many for any to stand out. Even its organising conceit is actually something that just sends the game exploding outwards in every direction. More than any other Mario game I can think of, this one worships at the church of bits and pieces. Ideas. Scraps of paper. It's glorious. So leap in.
To organise things a little: yes, it's another 2D Mario game, and yes you often run left to right and you bonk mushrooms and collect power-ups. Power-ups are fun here! Alongside Elephant Mario, who is clearly the star, there's the good old fire flower and invincible star, but there's also a new bubble flower, which allows you to trap enemies in bubbles, turning them into coins, and there's a drill-head Mario that allows you to jump inside walls and floors and run around there, avoiding anything on the surface.
But Elephant Mario is the star. What a guy. Big slam, huge weight, a trunk you can use to smash people with or can use to suck up water and spray it out. He's heft, consequence, but with that strange daintiness elephants sometimes seem to suggest, at least in storybooks. Elephant Mario is an object of great poise and I am deeply curious about them. Last night I wondered: what does Elephant Mario look like going through an in-game door? Turns out the developers got there first - of course they did. Elephant Mario getting through a door is sheer drama.
The power-ups are great, but they matter less than you might expect in a game in which every new level is a sort of power-up. Mario's off to the Flower Kingdom. This means flowers you can ping to open stuff out in levels, like coins and platforms. It means a new currency, Flower Coins, which are little purple things scattered around each level and three big things in each level you
