I remember when they were revealing all the Switch 2 stuff, and how it wasn’t launching with a Mario game, and then they announced this Donkey Kong stuff and it was a whole thing. Then it came out that the Super Mario Odyssey team was making it. Okay, tell me more.
I guess it’s a platformer insofar as it has platforms, but Donkey Kong doesn’t care about them in the traditional sense. Historically, people have to jump on platforms to get to him. This Kong can just grab a platform right out of the ground and surf around on it and shit. He throws platforms at people. I remember I fell way, way down once in the first real level of the game, and I was like… okay, maybe I live down here now. And then I remembered that DK can just climb surfaces arbitrarily – I didn’t see some kind of endurance bar or anything. Then, like a young man who had hoop dreams only to learn there were other ways to score, they just keep giving you game breaking stuff and send you outside to play. He goes where he wants to.
The freedom to rise as a titanic, simian annihilator might give you a brain tickle if you’re the kind of person who gets brain tickles. It’s worth it.
The core mechanic is the opposite of a platformer. It’s about burrowing and breaking things. Gabe and I both said Super Mario Sunshine at the same time, because it’s clear that in both of these cases they were allowed to commit fully to a bit – to snap expectations completely over their knee, for good or ill. Nintendo has been a toy company for over a century, and this game feels like a toy. It’s a toy that has other toys inside it, and every time you look inside there’s another one. They excel at reverse engineering the feeling of play, and finding new routes to that feeling so you can have it again and again. I wouldn’t have said that Donkey Kong Bananza is what I was waiting for, but they’ve been working on it for years and they knew better than me.
(CW)TB out.