Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker Review

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker is one of the smartest, most charming puzzle games of 2014. I’d also call it one of the best platformers of the year, except these characters can’t jump. It speaks volumes about Treasure Tracker’s wit and environment design that it completely strips us of the mobility powers that we’ve come to expect from a game set in the Super Mario universe and still provides lots of interesting puzzle options.

Expanding on the handful of refreshing and challenging Captain Toad levels from Super Mario 3D World, Treasure Tracker is about navigating Toad or Toadette through small stages by rotating the camera, observing the world around you, and avoiding the mess of enemies and traps that stand in your way. New abilities and twists, such as rhythm-based platforms that disappear on certain beats, and the cherry that can double, triple, or quadruple your character keep the entire six-hour journey feeling fresh.

Each of the 70-ish, bite-sized stages in Captain Toad are laid out like an MC Escher-designed diorama floating in space, and they’re all filled with great puzzles. There’s a great sense of discovery in exploring every nook and cranny of a stage, poking around the GamePad and seeing what you can interact with, and observing your surroundings from every imaginable angle. Guiding the Toads through the stages and learning enemy patterns in order to sneak past them always felt great, and being able to make it through a level in what felt like the optimal manner was nice and satisfying.

Most stages only require you to find a star in order to move on, with optional feats that include grabbing a trio of gems, and a unique bonus objective for each level. The stages are relatively simple to complete, but finding all of the secrets gets genuinely challenging. And I always felt motivated to pore over everything, thanks to some really great post-game secrets that can only be unlocked by discovering most of the gems.

Most of the time, Captain Toad moves at a slow pace and allows you to take your time navigating each level. You are always in full control of the camera, and while it definitely seemed a bit micro-manage-y, I like the freedom to view the world at whichever angle I wanted. The problem here is that it’s controlled both through the right stick and the GamePad’s gyrosensor, and the sensor can’t be turned off, so I found the camera spinning out of control whenever I moved my wrists. Also, if you’re playing only off the GamePad, messages and touch-screen prompts have a tendency to pop up and really obscure your view at important moments.

Without a single word of text, Nintendo managed to create a pair of sweet, endearing characters that I genuinely wanted to root for. Small details, like how Toad and Toadette cower in fear when they see a ghost, add a nice dollop of charm to the whole package. Sweet storybook vignettes add some extra motivation for pressing on, and the way Treasure Tracker ultimately ties into Super Mario 3D World is pretty great.

It’s a bummer that the overall package feels a bit cheap because of interface problems. There’s no screen that displays all of your stats on each level, which meant I had to constantly page through the 70 stages to see what I still needed to accomplish. You also can’t see the optional objective within the levels themselves, which seems like a silly thing to omit.