For the past few months we’ve been busy working on significant improvements and additions to the Steam Curator system. There’s still some work to be done before we can roll these out, but we wanted to share a bit about why we see Steam Curators as a crucial component to exploring Steam, and what changes we’re making.

Why Steam Curators?

We’ve heard from many of you that you want to have a more curated experience when shopping Steam; where the titles that are surfaced and recommended and highlighted are picked by humans that you know and trust. But, we also know that players have different tastes in games, so it’s unlikely that any single person or group could cater to the specific interests of every player in the world. This is why we believe that Valve can’t be the only form of curation in Steam – we would be under serving the tastes and viewpoints of many players.

So, we’re focusing on how to support the streamers, journalists, critics, content creators, writers, enthusiasts, and friends that you already know and trust to be able to help you find your next favorite game. By following a few Curators on Steam, you’ll not only start to see their recommendations appear prominently when browsing the Steam Store, but you can also explore each of their customized spaces within Steam and see all the titles they have reviewed.

Using the Steam Curator features on Steam is an opt-in thing. If you’re not interested in the opinions of human beings helping you find games that are worth your attention, then we also have some powerful features coming just for you. We’re hard at work on significant improvements to the core recommendation engine which algorithmically suggests games for all Steam users. We’re anxious to talk in depth about that technology too, and will do so in a future blog post.

What changes are coming?

Over the three years since introduction of Steam Curators, we’ve gathered a lot of feedback from all kinds of perspectives. We’ve heard from players, from curators, from streamers, from game developers, and from all kinds of other tastemakers and content creators. The feedback is clear that the system needs to do a bunch of things better in order to work well for the three primary sets of people it’s trying to serve: players, curators, and game developers.

Players

This system really only works if players find value from following some Curators. So we’re adding to the kinds of content that Curators are able to create, and increasing the places within Steam where that content can be seen.

• Recommendations provided by Steam Curators can already appear in the main featured spot on your Steam Home page as well as in a dedicated space on your home page. We’re building on this so that recommendations by Curators you follow will also show up at the top of tag and genre pages. This means as you explore, say the Free To Play page, you’ll see recommendations from your Curators for Free to Play games. If you are browsing RPG games, you’ll see RPG games featured from Curators you follow. And so forth.
• Many Curators create videos to accompany their reviews, so we’ll now start embedding those videos in a few places alongside the curation. This means that when you click through a recommendation, or when you browse a Curator’s page on Steam, you’ll be able to watch their videos in-line.
• We also know that some Curators will review games within certain themes, genres, or franchises. So, we’re adding a new feature for Curators to create lists of games they’ve reviewed that go together. These can be used to create lists such as “best couch co-op games”, “games with amazing Workshop support”, “games by my favorite designer”, “10 games to play while waiting for Witcher 4”, or any other set of interesting ways to organize groups of games.
• And if you are looking to find new new Curators that share your tastes, or offer unique information about particular kinds of games, you can explore the ‘Recommended Curators’ or ‘Top Curators’ lists. We’re fine-tuning the ‘Recommended Curators’ section to more accurately suggest Curators who recommend games like those you’ve been playing.

Curators

One of the pieces of feedback we received from Curators was that they felt it needed to be more rewarding and meaningful for a Curator to spend the time it takes to build and maintain their curation. So there are a few new things we’re building to tackle this.

• As we mentioned above, Curators that produce videos as part of their reviews will be see those videos embedded right next to their review in Steam. If you’re a Curator who’s already doing work to create content elsewhere, we want you to be able to use that work in your Steam curation. This means a few of the most popular video formats such as YouTube, nicovideo.jp, youku.com, and bilibili.com will appear right in Steam where players can easily watch them.
• Curators will be able to customize and brand their home on Steam by selecting games, lists, and tags to feature and by uploading a personalized background.
• We all know that graphs solve everything, so yes, we’re adding more of them. In particular, Curators will be able to see how their reviews impacted their follower’s behavior in the Steam store.
• We are helping connect developers with Curators that are most likely to have relevant audience of followers for the developers’ game. More on this below.

Game Developers

We’ve heard from many developers that they need a way of getting their game in front of Curators that have the right audience for that game, and to be able to do it in a way that is easy and secure. We’ve also heard from Curators that it can be a challenge to reach out to developers, who are often swamped with requests that they can’t easily filter through. So we’ve built a whole new system that we are calling Curator Connect.

With Curator Connect, developers can search for appropriate Curators, and then send a copy of their game directly through Steam. We’ve added a number of tools for finding relevant Curators and for identifying the forms of social impact that Curator may have. To start with, developers will be able to search the listings of Steam Curators, narrowing results by name, OS, language, or tags that the Curator indicates they focus on. In the results, developers will be able to see a snapshot of each Curator, including follower counts and any linked social media accounts such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Twitch, which can help verify that the Curator is truly who they claim to be. The developer can then build a list of the Curators they wish to send their game to, include a message describing their game, and hit ‘send’.

Curators can then browse a list of games that have been sent to them and can choose to accept or decline as they wish. Accepted games are added to that Curators Steam library to play and review. No need to mess with keys or e-mail.

Next Steps

Today we’re starting a closed beta with a few dozen Steam Curators of different sizes, niches, and languages. This gives us an opportunity to gather feedback and suggestions from Curators and gives those Curators an opportunity to use the new tools to prepare and personalize their store pages ahead of full release. The Steam Curators that are invited to participate in the beta are free to share their thoughts publicly, so you may see some screenshots or write-ups from these Curators as they explore the new features and discuss them with the community.

We’re aiming to run the beta for at least a couple weeks with just the Curators before releasing the update to everyone. Hopefully this blog post helps you understand what we’re trying to do, and why, which we believe will help everyone to have a fruitful conversation.

As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions, please let us know.

-The Steam Team

Chickens have a way of coming home to roost in the tech industry–and gaming hasn’t been immune to the lawless, “that’s tomorrow’s problem” mentality that leads to one ballooning crisis of irresponsibility after another. Instead of getting out in front of a predictable problem and putting guardrails around it, the industry tends to let things explode before admitting anything is even remotely wrong.

This was on my mind as I saw the latest debates about microtransactions and gambling swirl around. It’s all been discussed by popular gaming YouTubers like Jim Sterling and TotalBiscuit, as well as gaming journalists, the ESRB weighed in (with predictable cowardice), and it’s even been brought to the attention of the British government. 

That last bit should worry the industry. Its failure to self-regulate, to develop wide ranging ethical standards for the practice, will lead inevitably to the imposition of regulations from without. Gaming studios have, for the moment, been glorying in the grey area created by technological novelty, after all. Most people still don’t know or care what a “lootbox” is, much less regard its contents as in any way valuable.

The law agrees, for now. A recent Eurogamer article by Wesley Yin-Poole on gambling-esque microtransactions in FIFA 18 made clear at the start that:

The law says loot boxes are not gambling because the items obtained from them cannot be exchanged for real-life money. Here’s the blurb, from the Gambling Commission:

“Where prizes are successfully restricted for use solely within the game, such in-game features would not be licensable gambling.”

But reality will catch up to us. These in-game practices are, after all, in line with the letter of the law, but not their spirit. And even the former is getting a bit dodgy, as Yin-Poole notes, because a cottage industry has grown up around buying FUT Coins, FIFA 18’s currency. The coins can be acquired by using the in-game auction house to, say, rid yourself of a card/player you don’t like. 

This underground economy is hardly limited to FIFA 18. A recent scandal that was here and gone involved Counterstrike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and two gaming YouTubers–Trevor Martin and Thomas Cassell–failing to disclose that they were the owners of CSGOLotto, which they promoted to their often young viewers. It is explicitly advertised as a gambling site. 

As Engadget explained:

The site run by the pair, CSGO Lotto, allowed players to bet gun “skins” from the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that alter the look, but not the function, of weapons. Such skins can essentially be used as gambling chips, since they can exchanged at Valve’s Steam Marketplace for real cash, with Valve taking a 15 percent cut.

So, yes, the line between real currency and in-game items is already quite blurry. From a psychological standpoint, so far as dopamine hits and addictions are concerned, there is no material difference between this sort of behavior and going to a casino. I can’t credit Marin and Cassell with much in the way of honesty, but at least on CSGOLotto they make no bones about what’s happening. The only irony is that its name invokes legal, regulated gambling.

“Even if there were safeguards preventing the exchange of real money, or at least tightly regulating it, it doesn’t address the fundamental issue.”

But I would go a step further and say that even if there were safeguards preventing the exchange of real money, or at least tightly regulating it, it doesn’t address the fundamental issue. When you open a lootbox in, say, Star Wars: The Old Republic, you don’t know what you’re going to get.

You can buy boxes in bulk (like, say, a wad of scratch cards) to increase your odds of getting the thing you want. You commit actual money to this. You feel the frisson of chance gnawing at you. When you get The Thing, be it a swishy lightsaber, a speeder, an exotic pet, or a rare outfit, you feel like you’ve won something tangible. It tickles you so much that you forgot you spent sixty dollars to get it.

The old standby excuse, “you don’t need any of this,” isn’t enough. This is a widespread practice for a reason. It generates money because it works. Simply saying “you don’t have to” is as much a non-sequitur here as it is at a casino. It misses the point. You’re deliberately enticing people, then they get on the treadmill, and it’s damned hard to get off. You’re spending money on a probabilistically uncertain outcome, specifically a reward that you value enough to spend on. It’s as real as winning a hundred bucks through your state, provincial, or national lottery.

While it’s far more ethical to show players what they’re buying and guarantee it to them upon purchase, there’s still questions to be asked about the unlimited spending potential inherent to these sorts of microtransactions as well. I recently wrote about Star Trek Online and found its microtransaction system to be intriguing, but also a bit eyewatering.

A pack of nine starships–one for each of the three factions and three specializations–can go for 90 to 120 dollars. There’s no cap on how much you can buy, no limit to what you can convince yourself you need. Twenty dollars for a replica of the Galaxy-class interior, four dollars for an exotic Tribble, 25 for a Tier 5 ship or 30 for Tier 6 (buy three at once and save twenty dollars! A ninety dollar value, yours for sixty! I could almost hear the Billy Mays voice).

As Jim Sterling recently observed while discussing the 60 USD price point of AAA games, that money now constitutes the cost of admission rather than the purchase of a complete experience. There is a “tall tail” of buying potential available to players now, where 60 dollars becomes 120 or 250 or 500 or even 1,000 over months of play because of everything being put in front of you in an online bazaar. 

Japan’s game developers faced government regulation of in-game gambling after they refused to self-regulate. In 2012, the Consumer Affairs Agency outlawed virtual games of chance. Devs had to remove “complete gacha” systems from their games.

It may not be gambling per se, by even the most futurist of definitions, but it should raise serious ethical questions about what studios are trying to make players do, if this isn’t just a bit of shady hucksterism. Even if what players are buying has no value outside of the game, and exists only as 1s and 0s.

***

We come back to the bugbear of every ethical discussion about the virtual world, then. “It’s not real, so we don’t need rules.” It was a lie when it was about online harassment, and it’s a lie when discussing whether or not these microtransactions are a form of gambling. The terms of socializing are indeed different from that of the physical world, but it involves things that are real enough to the participants. The consequences of words and deeds in virtual worlds have always been real. This is no different.

At the end of his Eurogamer article, Yin-Poole notes that his nephew horrified his family by spending £300 on FIFA coins. He’s 11. A top comment on his article went one better:

I’m a primary school teacher. The incident with your nephew is not an outlier at all. I know of at least a half dozen incidents of similar scale over the past couple of years in our school. One went to €900 and had a very detrimental effect to the family involved.

The world’s governments aren’t tabling legislation yet. But we’re already at a crisis point. This is real. Maybe players don’t, technically, have to buy anything; but the industry needs to do something.
 

Katherine Cross is a Ph.D student in sociology who researches anti-social behavior online, and a gaming critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications.

We’re excited to share how Gears of War 4 has been enhanced for the Xbox One X. Our new trailer showcases the wealth of graphical and gameplay enhancements that are only possible with the world’s most powerful console.  We’re also excited to finally reveal the Preferred Rendering mode so you can play Gears of War 4 how you want!

True 4K Experience
Get ready to experience unmatched clarity, richness and details with true 4K visuals (3840×2160) in our Visuals Rendering Mode. Even if you’re playing on a 1080p screen, you’ll instantly notice the difference thanks to a 4K super sampled image that brings you a crisper, richer looking Gears game than you’ve ever seen before.

HDR
High Dynamic Range provides increased contrast between lights and darks. Battling your way through a lightning flurry in a windflare has never looked better. Gears of War 4 on Xbox One X supports a wide color gamut for true-to-color definition – just as the artists intended – and now at 4K resolution.

Up to 60FPS For Ultra Smooth Gameplay

We’re excited to announce Xbox One X owners will have two Preferred Rendering Options to choose from in Gears of War 4 – Visuals and Performance!

Performance

Put framerate first. For the first time ever, Gears of War will play at up to 60fps in 1080p in Campaign and Horde – all including higher resolution textures and some of the new enhanced graphical features available in Visuals mode.

Visuals

Push graphical fidelity to the max. This mode uses Ultra Quality Textures, a wealth of new and improved graphical features all at 4K resolution (3840×2160) thanks to the power of Xbox One X. You’ll experience the same frame rates you’ve come to expect from Gears of War 4 – 30fps for Campaign and Horde .

In both Rendering modes, Versus will run at a rock-solid 4K 60FPS (with adaptive resolution scaling).

Dolby Atmos Audio Support

When playing Gears of War 4 on Xbox One, we now offer Dolby Atmos, which gives you immersive, moving audio.

The Dolby Access app lets you set up your Dolby Atmos enabled home theater, TV, or sound bar for free, and lets you try or buy Dolby Atmos for Headphones, which gives you immersive sound on any headphones. Experience the visceral sounds of Gears of War in a way that will make you feel like you’re inside the action, only on Xbox One.

Our Most Immersive World Thanks To New Features

The world of Sera has never been more immersive thanks to brand new features and higher resolution textures – all possible with the additional horsepower and memory offered by the Xbox One X.

Enhanced Light Shafts
Also known as God Rays, Enhanced Light Shafts provide true-to-life beams of sunlight in the world. Prepare for jaw dropping lighting as the God Rays peek through gaps in the canopy of trees above you, or in sunset conditions peeking through buildings and statues.

Dynamic Shadows
Shadows in Gears of War 4 are usually pre-defined by an artist to accurately reflect the shadows objects in the world would cast based on the lighting. On Xbox One X, dynamic shadows now react true to the lighting conditions and movement of objects – for example, trees blowing in the wind will cast an accurate moving shadow on the ground – bringing the world of Sera to life like never before.

Increased Draw Distances
With the power of Xbox One X, we can maintain higher resolution textures at a further distance than ever before – creating a higher fidelity picture and crisper world around you, even on the horizon.

Superior Reflections
We’ve pushed our surface space reflections even further to look closer to as you would expect in real life. Reflective surfaces now have a higher definition reflection of your character – whether that’s in a mirror-like reflection of water, or the muddied color reflective nature of metal. It looks especially awesome on the DeeBee’s metallic armor!

Enhanced Character Textures
With our higher resolution textures now available on console thanks to Xbox One X, characters show more detail from head to toe. They’ve never looked better!

Experience this all at no extra cost for Gears of War 4 owners when you pick up your Xbox One X. And, if you’re picking up the Xbox One X but haven’t jumped in to Gears of War 4 yet, you can try it FREE now with our 10-hour trial – the perfect showcase piece for your new super-powered console.

We’re incredibly proud of what the team has been able to achieve on Xbox One X so far. We can’t wait to see you all experience this feast for your eyeballs!

TC

For some gamers the idea of a ‘sandbox’ Mario game is pure retro. Super Mario 64 played a big part in revolutionising gaming, not just 3D platforming, and then Super Mario Sunshine took the idea in some interesting new directions on GameCube. Yet the Wii was a transformative console in taking Nintendo back to the top of the home console space; by the time Super Mario Galaxy rolled around it was a revolution, flipping Mario quite literally on his head. In that game and its sequel Mario’s playgrounds became tightly structured and designed stages, following the approach that served his 2D adventures so well.

On Wii U we then had Super Mario 3D World, in a sense a hybrid – it incorporated some of the ideas and ‘feel’ of 2D Mario but had some dizzying creativity; it was also a rarely successful multiplayer Mario platforming experience. Yet that blend hasn’t been repeated, with the only thing that’s ‘hybrid’ about Super Mario Odyssey being the hardware on which it belongs. Make no mistake, Odyssey owes its heritage and roots to Super Mario 64, a link that Cappy wears like a badge of honour.

Cappy, of course, is not only Mario’s sidekick but is actually the star. Without Cappy the rotund hero is rather vulnerable, as he explores lands where no power-ups can help him. The little – and charmingly courageous – hat brings the key feature of the game: capturing. In giving Mario dozens of creatures, enemies and even inanimate objects to capture, Nintendo gifts us with more toys than we’ve ever had in a Mario world and makes them all fun, in what’s an impressive display of development and design bravura.

In any case, let’s go back to the beginning. Super Mario Odyssey starts off with an impressive cinematic in which Mario is anything but the cocky hero – Bowser is besting him. The famous foe is intent on marrying Peach and Mario can’t stop him, getting swept off Bowser’s ship to the land below. Cappy follows and we start off in Bonneton (the Cap Kingdom), where sentient hats bemoan the loss of one of their own to serve as Peach’s tiara. Naturally Bowser and his evil rabbit wedding planners have left a mess and destroyed all of the flying hat-shaped ships (stick with us here). Mario, dishevelled but determined, meets Cappy and begins his journey.

It’s bonkers, and delightfully so. You learn very early on that it’s a game where sanity and conventional wisdom have no place. In fact, it goes out of its way to emphasize those points – within the first hour you possess a couple of animals made famous in the many promotional videos for the game; there are wacky boss encounters, retro 2D transitions and sweeping orchestral music. The early tempo is right on the money to set the scene, and though there’s a little scope for freedom the first hour or two is relatively tightly structured as the game teaches you – albeit relatively organically – how to go about saving the princess.

A lot of these lessons are necessary for those more used to linear Mario games, but the training wheels do eventually come off. Much feels familiar, regardless – Mario may initially feel a little lighter and more athletic, with a bit of a ‘skid’ to his run and the instinctive ability to climb ledges. Nevertheless in no time all the old moves come back – the triple jump, high jump, long jump and more. There are excellent ways the game teaches newcomers, but for veterans it won’t take long to get into the groove.

Throwing Cappy is the key – he defeats enemies, captures them, solves puzzles and even acts as a spring to boost Mario’s jumps. The basic throw is easy, but Nintendo has also utilised motion controls for broader moves such as a circular attack (also vital for some puzzles) and the option to fling him vertically. The key moves to progress in the game can all be done with a button press, but some of the smarter throws do require motion inputs. The game pushes you towards using the two Joy-Con as they’re light and responsive, though this scribe has a left controller that occasionally does the dreaded disconnect trick. Thankfully the Pro Controller also works well with the motion inputs, even if it feels less intuitive and stylish shaking the bulky pad around; for long spells of exploration we’d rarely use the motion-only moves, in any case.

What these optional controls also do is remind us that, at its heart, this is a console game best enjoyed on the TV. In theory the motion inputs work in handheld mode, and we had fun in portable play sessions, but it’s not ideal to move and shake the console around – it’s probably best advised not to. It’s a game with sizeable worlds that feels like it yearns for a bigger screen than the system itself can offer.

Back to the core game – once you’ve mastered Cappy you set off on the Odyssey across over a dozen lands. There’s a bit of linear plot to guide you for a while, tied to the Odyssey’s range as a ship. As you reach new Kingdoms your priorities are twofold – to follow key checkpoints to defeat bosses and progress the story, but also to find extra Power Moons to fuel the ship. The design is particularly clever in the first go around, as a lot of extra moons can be discovered on your route from A to B. They’ll catch the corner of your eye, or you’ll see the tell-tale sign of a puzzle or hidden area.

On top of this you’re also looking for gold and purple coins. Gold coins are – in essence – your lives, not that you’ll actually run out; when you die you sacrifice a small number, but it’s pretty inconsequential. That does mean there’s no sense of ‘game over’ peril, but that’s nothing new as Mario games have had endless continues for years. In a game focused on exploration and joyful experimentation this is an understandable approach.

Each Kingdom has two stores – a broad range is purchasable with the common gold coins, with region-specific outfits and souvenirs (which can be stuck on and inside the Odyssey) available with that area’s purple currency. Finding the fixed number of each region’s currency is a nice sub-quest outside of Power Moons, especially if you want to plaster your ship in stickers and build up your varied collection of outfits for Mario.

In the first half of the game, in zones you’ve likely seen in Nintendo’s various videos, veterans may ultimately feel they’re not being stretched. The return to a collect-a-thon approach is risky in that sense, as clearing mini stages and simple puzzles doesn’t always have the same dizzying allure of full inventive levels. Yet the freedom to play and explore does become intoxicating as you realise just how much Mario and Cappy can do. Importantly, too, after the first five zones (in our case) it felt like the experience ramped up, progressing from being excellent Mario gaming to exceptional.

Surprise encounters come at the right moments, and the first arrival at New Donk City feels like a heralding of the real game, with the lessons and easy introductions being mostly finished. It’s a fantastic environment to explore, and the areas that follow seem to take that ball and run with it. That’s not to say there’s anything particularly negative about the first half of the game, but it becomes special once you reach the familiar cityscape.

The transformations, the varied challenges (some with online leaderboards), the visuals, it all continues to up the ante. We found ourselves accumulating many more moons than technically required simply because some lands drew us in and gave us the urge to experiment, the desire to find the next delightfully silly solution. You start finding more standalone stages, too, which become increasingly clever and entertaining as a result. One surprise encounter towards the end is also incredibly random, making us wonder where the heck it came from and what inspired it. That sense of not knowing what’s next is one of the best things about the experience.

The latter lands are the apex, with Bowser evidently taking his game up a notch as he seeks the wedding of his dreams. It becomes riveting at this point, and as you reach the initial ending you’re greeted by one of the best final boss encounters that Nintendo has ever created. It’s right up there.

Once the credits roll, though, Nintendo has found a smart way to keep you interested, and the post-game is both sizeable and fun. There are a few new areas (we won’t spoil them here) to reach, and in the process you can find even more challenge stages and puzzles to solve. It’s a true collect-a-thon at this point, but it’s superior in its design to what we saw in the genre’s early days. We felt more than happy to chase the ‘real’ ending, and it had a few delights of its own. You can even keep going after that if you’re a true completionist.

In our case this was played mostly as a solo experience, but Nintendo has integrated co-op support where one controls Mario – and generally runs the show – and another helps as Cappy. It’s a smart addition, especially if any young or inexperienced gamers want to join in but aren’t ready for three-dimensional running and jumping. Though Mario can snap Cappy back and take charge, it’s useful when player two roams free to collect coins or take out enemies. Cappy has slightly more range in co-op, so player two doesn’t necessarily need to feel tethered at all times.

It’s better than the ‘co-op’ in the Galaxy games, but not in the same league – obviously – as the genuine multiplayer of Super Mario 3D World. It was memorably described to this writer as ‘better than Tails’ in Sonic Mania, in terms of the feeling of actual participation; in that respect it’s a welcome inclusion. One other note for parents or players planning multiple run-throughs, meanwhile, is that ‘Data Management’ is found under options; here you can have five save files per system user.

Also included here, which can be optionally turned on or off at any time, is Assist Mode. This does a few things – Mario starts with a bigger health bar, he doesn’t immediately drop coins if he falls off the stage, and it puts fallen players near where they perished as opposed to the last checkpoint flag. On top of this there are guidance arrows to direct players to the key objectives, nudging them towards progress. As an extra this is a smart addition, as we know Switch converts that are keen to try the game but are worried by their inexperience when it comes to 3D Mario. Nintendo, quite rightly, wants those players to feel welcome.

For you amiibo collectors, these also offer a bit of assistance whenever you please. We weren’t testing the new ‘wedding’ figures for this review, but tried a variety of older amiibo. Non-Mario figures give you small rewards, for example, and scanning one of the ‘Anniversary’ Mario pixel amiibo figures gave us a nice surprise. You can also use amiibo to get tips on Power Moons you haven’t yet discovered, helping with the hunt later in the game. The functionality is generally a cute but entirely optional, and should also help some players in tricky areas when they need a small boost.

Our focus up to now has been gameplay, where Super Mario Odyssey shines, but Nintendo has also hit top gear in the game’s technical achievements. Whether on the TV or portable the gameplay rocks along at 60fps, entirely solid 99% of the time. It’s easy to forget now, but the original ‘sandbox’ Mario games ran at half that rate. On top of that the game is a looker, borrowing the visual approaches that are now so familiar from Nintendo – the Pixar-style cartoon-to-life vibe. It’s a bright and colourful game and also, at times, genuinely beautiful. It’s certainly a contender as the best-looking Switch game to date.

That’s certainly the case when docked, as we feel that playing the title through a good TV is the best way to experience the game. Nintendo, to its credit, has done more than bump the resolution from portable to docked; there are notable enhancements that use the extra resources. The game still looks impressive on the portable, but there are more noticeable artifacts and edges – bringing the action to a TV improves these areas. It’s not just a variation in pixel counts, there are genuine differences. We’re pleased to see this, as while Odyssey provides silky smooth and good-looking gaming on the go, it feels like a genuine ‘console’ game when kicking out of a large display.

As always, we should also give a nod to the music. Famously this title has a ‘lead’ track with vocals that’s even available for download, which is reflective of the confidence and swagger Nintendo demonstrates with the game as a whole. The music, overall, is excellent, in some cases ambient and in the background and at other points designed to get the player hyped up. Then there are the smart touches, like music distorting and changing if you’re underwater, or shifting to a chiptune version in a retro 2D section – all good stuff.

Beyond the sweeping scope, in fact, it’s a game all about small touches. From tourist-style maps for each Kingdom that give you little details on the locale, to silly Power Moon tasks and fun transformations, it’s a game keen to make players smile. It acknowledges the heritage of the title that started it all, Super Mario 64, but is still very much a game of this time – that is its greatest strength.

Campfire Cooking is Now Available on Steam and is 15% off!*

Campfire Cooking is a puzzle game about relaxing moments in nature, as you prepare meals over a warm fire. Follow a family’s vacation to beautiful and exotic hiking trails. Listen to stories, toast marshmallows, simmer fondue or play with magnets until each meal is ready to eat.

*Offer ends October 25 at 10AM Pacific Time