The telescope is not quite a telescope, but it still works like one. And, more importantly, it still feels like one. You put your eye to the glass and then you move left and right to scan a glorious horizon drawn in sunny skies and churning ocean currents. What’s out there? What’s waiting for me? Where next?
Mario & Luigi Brothership reviewPublisher: NintendoDeveloper: NintendoPlatform: Played on Nintendo SwitchAvailability: Out on 7th November on Nintendo Switch
This is my favourite moment, my favourite little ritual, in Mario & Luigi: Brothership. Brothership’s the latest in a much loved series of RPGs in which the brother in red and the brother in green head off on an adventure together, completing quests and side-quests, engaging in exploration and puzzling, and getting stuck into turn-based battles. Brothership’s best new idea lies with the telescope, and it’s also hinted at in the game’s name. This time, you float around on a hub that’s also a ship – it’s also an island, incidentally, and it’s called Shipshape, which isn’t a bad pun – and you’re regularly tasked with tracking down the scattered islands that make up the world of Concordia, before climbing each island’s lighthouse and using it to connect the island to your home vessel. Gather those islands. Reunite the world. Onwards!
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Thematically, this is all a little muddled, I know. Islands, but you connect them all via lighthouses? And almost everyone I meet is a kind of anthropomorphic plug socket or computer port? At times – any time you think too much about it – Brothership’s narrative can feel like the joke adventure that Paper Mario once sent Luigi on to explain his absence from the game. Mario would be off on a quest that made some kind of sense, but every now and then Luigi would check in with some true RPG weirdness. You know, like collecting islands, or hanging out with talking plug sockets.