Paper Mario: The Origami King, review: Charming Nintendo RPG mixes gimmicks with substance

The sixth entry in the Paper Mario series is familiar, kid-friendly fun – but shows signs of evolution

★★★★☆

A short while into Paper Mario: The Origami King, Mario climbs up a multi-story building festooned with colourful pencil-drawn murals. After fighting and defeating a demonic pencil box – which fires pencils from its lid like surface-to-air missiles – Mario climbs back down the building to discover the murals have disappeared. His companion, an origami figure called Olivia, pauses: how, she wonders, do we make peace with the fact that great art can come from terrible creators?

It’s a disarmingly frank moment, a rare instance of a Nintendo game rising to engage with the changing tides of our culture. Too often the Japanese publisher’s games seem to exist in a hermetically sealed bubble. Its best-selling Switch games – among them Super Mario Odyssey, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Animal Crossing: New Horizons and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – are all throwbacks, continuations of decades-old franchises. This Neverlandish refusal to grow up is not a bug, of course, but a feature. Nintendo has weaponised nostalgia as Einstein did the atom.

Nintendo’s approach only works if their new games can go toe-to-toe with their forebears for amusement and invention, and The Origami King does this with aplomb. From the off, it feels crisply fun and addictive – easy enough for young children to grasp but complex enough to keep adults engaged.

The Origami King is an RPG (role-playing game) with platforming and puzzle elements; players control the paper plumber as he explores a world that has been overrun by villainous origami figurines. The battle system is one of the game’s own unique devising: Mario stands in the centre of a ringed circle, with enemies scattered around the edges. Before attacking, you are given the chance to align the enemies, shifting rings or sections either laterally or vertically. It’s easy to learn, and irritatingly tricky to master – even deep into the game, some of the line-ups still left me stumped. Inverting the pattern, boss fights place Mario on the outside of a circle, having to shift and navigate his own way inward towards the central foe.

There’s a whiff of gimmickry to this. Players who groused that subsequent games didn’t maintain the purer RPG mechanics of 2000’s Paper Mario and 2004’s Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door are unlikely to lay down their cudgels here. But the challenge is surprisingly long-lasting, and the combat, while less enjoyable than the exploration and world-building, is bright and pacey.

The Origami King may not hit the heights of some of its Switch contemporaries such as Odyssey or Super Mario Maker 2, but it’s still an engrossing adventure. Like its two-dimensional papier protagonist, this is a game that appears outwardly familiar but, on closer inspection, stands as its own thing: an affably weird addition to Nintendo’s ever-growing catalogue of crowd-pleasers.

‘Paper Mario: The Origami King’ is available to buy on Nintendo Switch now