One of the loveliest thoughts about games that I have read in ages came – and this was not surprising to me – from Tom Senior, the online editor of PC Gamer. “I feel like we should run Into the Breach scenarios in PC Gamer like newspaper Chess puzzles,” he wrote. “ie. “Two mechs are webbed in a tide zone. Save both and protect the factory.””
I read that and thought: of course! Into the Breach is a wonderfully compact turn-based tactics game that plays out on a small grid. You keep waiting for the grid to get bigger as you play, but thankfully it stays the same size throughout, while your growing understanding of the game and its pieces means your options get richer instead. It would work gloriously in the back pages of a newspaper, in alongside a chess problem and a Sudoku. It is hard for me to play it these days without imagining its ideal form, a la Senior, rendered in smudged newsprint, to be toyed with over the course of a morning commute.
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker stirs the same kind of thoughts in me, even though it’s nowhere near as tidy a fit. I missed this wonderful anti-platforming platform game when it arrived on Wii U, so it’s a delight to be able to catch up with it on Switch. Captain Toad sees you exploring a chunk of Mushroom Kingdom territory, nominally searching for the gold star located in each level, but really just exploring and tinkering with things. Mario games have been feeling like little pieces of nursery sculpture for a long time: they are chunky and have pleasantly rounded edges, and they delight in materials such as shiny plastic, smoothly-planed wood and sponge (or is it sponge cake?).
Source: Eurogamer Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker and the pleasures of a secondary objective