Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is what I like to think of as a movement-based puzzle game in the vein of FEZ, where the primary challenge is in arranging the world to accommodate the protagonist’s minimal traversal capabilities. Except FEZ did so via an ingenious melding of dimensions and supplemented its standard puzzles with a variety of esoteric ones. Captain Toad’s puzzle-solving is basically glorified camera control. It’s distinctly charming – the levels have a cozy terrarium-like feel and a beautifully-interlocking structure – but that’s all it is. The basic gameplay triggers no emotions in me, positive or negative, as I think back on it. The bonus objectives in each level retain a slight spark of interest, but it’s extinguished by remembering that achieving them requires playing each level up to four times. Furthermore, the Switch version is burdened with poorly-implemented cursor/touch controls and the inexplicable omission of existing levels based on Super Mario 3D World.