For a brief period, either in the 1950s or 1960s, Charles Schulz experimented with drawing adults in the backgrounds of Peanuts comic strips. I wish I could track down the one strip I’ve seen like this to explain it better – if anyone’s seen my copy of Peanuts: A Golden Celebration, could they drop me a line? Anyway, Charlie Brown and Linus are on a golf course, I think, and there are these adults, never fully in frame because the kids are so small, and the adults are moving around, standing in the background, forming a sort of human topiary of arms and legs and torsos.
It is – to be frank – super weird. Firstly, the adult clothes age the strip in a way that Charlie Brown’s zig-zag shirt never has. Secondly, they completely throw out the scale. Are the kids tiny or are the adults giants? And they also clutter everything up. That shining Peanuts clarity – the expanse of sky Schulz managed to get into the tiny space of a newspaper comic panel every morning for half a century – is suddenly gone. It’s very, very odd.
Sadly, it’s not my job to write about Peanuts all day, but I think of that weird comic strip every time I play Super Mario Odyssey, the Mario game that… how to put this? The Mario game that I find the least comforting and familiar. Super Mario Odyssey is – to be frank – super weird, if you ask me. The designers have spoken about this a little – they’ve talked about wanting to make a game that feels like a journey to somewhere new, and I’ve read that a lot of the ideas in the games have a basis in the team’s own memories. But it’s taken me an age to pin down why the end result feels quite so strange and so different to what’s come before, even while containing so many of the same mechanics and the same thinking. I’m going to try to pin that down now, and Peanuts will maybe help.
First up: this game is wonderful. With the Switch, Mario returns to the expansive sandbox template of Mario 64 and Sunshine. The levels are really large and intricate, and there’s always a handful of objectives you could be going for at any moment. The range of levels is almost overwhelming and they’re all filled with secret areas, little jokes, one-shot animations and other asides.