Donkey Kong Bananza

Everybody knows the smart move when they begin a platform game: turn away from the adventure to check for secrets in the opposite direction. Not so in Donkey Kong Bananza. Placed on its first screen, you’ll instead stop to smash it all to pieces. Straight jabs with the Y button knock dents, then holes, into walls and lumps of gold cascade out, which DK (as folks here call our simian hero) collects. It’s a beautifully feral and gratifying action, placed exactly where you'd expect it on the controller. Yet the same can’t be said of jumping, the platforming fundamental that normally occupies the B button by default. Tapping B here takes you down instead of up, DK pounding at the floor until it gives way. In a stroke, Nintendo thus reconfigures the genre it all but invented, removing the ground beneath our feet.

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There is an option to shift jump (placed by default on the A button) back to its familiar home, and it’s one we soon take – decades of muscle memory find the change a touch too extreme. But we can appreciate the intention behind it. Bananza announces itself as not merely an alternative to Mario while we await the plumber's return, but a genre rejig of a scale Mario himself hasn’t seen since 1996. The platform game is turned inside out and upside down here, supported by voxel-based terrain deforming tech that needs Switch 2’s power (even then, there are framerate dips).

The simulation of destruction in Bananza is a special trick indeed, and Nintendo is keen to show it off. After our initial outburst, we're let loose in a vast cave where monkeys mine for gem-like bananas, and running towards the next marked objective is the last thing on our mind – the invitation to break things is irresistible. As rock clusters buckle and explode and seams of gold shatter like caramel, we keep hammering that punch button, almost mindlessly, carving labyrinths into the scenery before resurfacing in uncharted territory.

There’s constant positive reinforcement as bursts of shiny ore gather in our wake – like a rowdy King Midas, everything we punch turns to gold.