Captain Toad Treasure Tracker

Captain Toad Treasure Tracker

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is yet another Wii U-to-Switch port Nintendo brushed off for wider exposure. It’s a 3D puzzle game where the player moves slow-and-steady Captain Toad across cube-shaped puzzle worlds to collect diamonds, coins, and stars. The story is the typical dumb boring Nintendo stuff, Toadette gets captured by some big bird and Captain Toad is gonna save her. I would wonder why they even bother except it’s Nintendo and they do this kind of thing on principle. The puzzles are tightly-designed, and though the gyroscope-pointer controls imported over from the Wii U are a little clunky and weird, it’s a charming and chill puzzle experience. Visually, the game is a delight. Rotating the level to examine all the nooks and crannies is fun and there are lots of neat hidden touches. This traditionally isn’t my kind of game, but I dig it and I understand why Dunkey was so taken by it. It is truly a beautifully conceived game in terms of level design.

The base challenge is to collect a star each level. The secondary challenge is collecting 3 diamonds, which are also used as currency to unlock some future levels. I also like the additional challenges that are revealed after the level is complete, which can range from collecting x coins to defeating all/no enemies. Once a diamond is found you don’t have to find it again, which speeds up replays and keeps the experience chill. The game achieves a nice balance for players who might only want to play a level once versus completionists who want to kick the tires and look behind every door. Donut blew through this game in several play sessions, totally disregarding the optional challenges, but I’ve enjoyed taking a more leisurely pace to get the star, diamonds, and extra challenge criteria (usually) for each.

I only have two complaints. Nintendo has added boring completionist bloat in the form of pixel toad hunts, which serve as one last excuse to play through the level again to find the hidden toad. Though not as egregious as the unnecessary collectibles in a game like Yoshi’s Crafted World, it feels like a lazy addition to an otherwise tightly-designed game. This game also has a co-op mode and I’m sorry to say my precious Donut was nearly driven to patricide when we attempted it. It’s been about a year since we tried, so we could probably manage it now that we have both matured on our path to adulthood, but having to share the spatial controls was a real test at times. The coop mode is an obvious afterthought in this case, as opposed to a game like Luigi’s Haunted Mansion 3 where coop makes the game even more fun. Single player mode is the definitive way to play.

This game has paid DLC to add 5 more levels. I read the DLC was actually designed for coop, so I may give it a try. Also worth noting, this game evidently has a VR mode for 4 levels. I had no idea there was a Nintendo Labo VR kit.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker - Episode 2

Donut stopped playing this game at puzzle #18 because they couldn’t beat the crow boss and we assumed that was the end. Imagine my surprise when I “beat” the game and unlocked episode 2. Episode 2 has 18 more puzzles and episode 3 has 28. We’ve got a lot of puzzling to go!

Episode 2 has a similar storyline, but this time Captain Toad is the one who gets caught by the bird and Toadette goes to save him. There’s a bump up in difficulty. Not only are the puzzles more challenging, they are more likely to require multiple playthroughs to get all the things.

I’m starting to get a little obsessed with this game because of the cuteness of the level design, especially the small courses. I have always liked Toads in a general sense, but now I really like them. Their screams of triumph and despair never cease to be funny, and I like that one guy is always sleeping on the job. Good for him.

I forgot to mention previously, if you complete enough optional challenges you get to play bonus coin levels. This are very short, but stupidly fun. You usually have the choice between a hammer level, where you get a hammer to smash things up in about 10 seconds, or a cherry level where you can create two (or three or four) Toad clones to gather coins as fast as possible, but I recently unlocked mummy maze levels where a Toad traverses a maze filled with coins and treasure with a mummy hot on their heels. The glacial plodding of both the Toad and the mummy makes it the only chaser I’ll probably ever enjoy, as RPGMaker chasers traumatized me for life.