Hours into Kirby and the Forgotten Land , I realized I may never end up knowing why Kirby, Nintendo’s adorable shape-shifting puffball hero, is …
Hours into Kirby and the Forgotten Land, I realized I may never end up knowing why Kirby, Nintendo’s adorable shape-shifting puffball hero, is wandering through a series of half-rotted, abandoned worlds. And I was fine with that. Kirby is still in many ways an enigma, exactly as we’ve always known him. And after weeks of playing the latest highly anticipated Kirby game for the Switch, I’d say it’s mostly lived up to the hype. Nintendo hasn’t had a big 3D-type gaming platformer in a while. Super Mario 3D World, which came out last winter, was a port of a Wii U game from 2013. Super Mario Odyssey came out nearly five years ago, in 2017. Luigi’s Mansion 3 — does that count? — might be the most recent game, and it came out in 2019. Kirby and the Forgotten Land reminds me of all three games, combined in a Kirby shape-shifting world with very familiar enemies. It’s absolutely worth it, especially if you have a friend or kid to play along in co-op. It’s not necessarily better than any of those other games, but in the words of my 9-year-old son, this is the best Kirby game he can remember. (I still love Canvas Curse, but I think he’s right.) This game isn’t fully open-world, as you may’ve discovered by playing the free demo. Its individual levels, which come about five to a world, are self-contained and pretty linear. But they get bigger and a bit more sprawling as the game goes on. Some of the levels feel as long as four Super Mario 3D World levels strung together, if that gives any perspective. While the level structure, which has a fixed camera perspective, reminds me of the zoomed-back 3D style of Super Mario 3D World, the new Mouthful Mode power-ups, which let Kirby take over objects to solve puzzles in different sections of the game, remind me of the way Mario’s hat takes over objects in Odyssey.
