'Princess Peach: Showtime' doesn't get a standing ovation, but it's still a fun time at the theatre
Princess Peach's stage debut isn't a modern classic by any means, but it's impossible to dislike.
In 2005, Super Princess Peach hit the Nintendo DS in what felt like something of a monumental moment for Nintendo. Here was gaming's most famous damsel in distress, finally getting the chance to star in her own game and, you know, actually do stuff for once besides play tennis.
And then, naturally, they never made a sequel to it and Peach went right back to playing the same role she'd played since the early 1980s. Bummer.
Princess Peach: Showtime doesn't entirely right this wrong (it's a new game, not a sequel to Super Princess Peach), but it comes close enough to count. Nintendo's biggest non-remake Switch exclusive of 2024 so far is a pleasant, bite-sized adventure that will probably do more for the young'uns than their 30-something parents who are reading this review, but there's just enough thread to pull with each game-changing costume swap to be fun for the 6 to 8 hours it takes to finish Showtime.
What I liked about Princess Peach: Showtime
Drip queen
Like most games in the Mario milieu, Showtime has a refreshingly thin premise that allows the player to actually play the game within about 10 minutes of booting it up. Here it is in a sentence: The Sparkle Theatre has been overtaken by the evil villain Grape and her Sour Bunch goons, and Peach needs to don several costumes to star in several different plays to save the theatre.
In other words, Showtime is a fashion showcase with a simple video game built around it. Each level represents an act of a play, and each play revolves around a different starring role for Peach. Sometimes she's a swordfighter, other times she's a cowgirl, or a dashing thief, or a figure skater, or...you get the picture.
Each of these costumes, in turn, has its own gameplay mechanics that are all remarkably simple to grasp and, for the most part, are pretty fun to mess around with. Swordfighter Peach can bang out hack-and-slash combos while performing well-timed parry and riposte moves, Ninja Peach can use various tools to sneak around and quietly take out enemies, and so on.
What makes all of these costume changes work is that you'll only ever need an analog stick and two face buttons in any given level. There's never any confusion about where to go, what to do, or what you can do. To be clear, there isn't a single transformation that stands out as being especially great. With one exception that we'll get to later, they're all just fun, and deep enough to get you through a couple of stages with each. Thankfully, Showtime doesn't really ask for much more out of you.
It's structurally straightforward, too, as each floor of the Sparkle Theatre contains four stages and a boss fight after you finish all of those. I didn't adore every single boss fight in Showtime, but they're all at least fun to look at and a couple of them have clever ideas, such as one that's more of a platforming challenge that revolves around a time-rewinding mechanic.
Give those set designers a raise
Speaking of "fun to look at," the real spice of Showtime lies in its aesthetics. Sparkle Theatre is a fun, high-concept setting for a platformer. Each stage looks and feels hand-crafted, with buildings and even some animals clearly made out of stage materials. The game maintains consistency in this regard, too, as levels that take place underwater or high in the sky still have a stage floor at the bottom of the screen.
Stage lighting is also smartly used to highlight Peach, as well as other pertinent objects and characters. Showtime isn't some stunning 4K powerhouse, and I'm not sure it's even one of the best looking games on Switch, but it's cute, colorful, and entirely dedicated to a cool idea.
Nothing overstays its welcome
I'll keep this section short because that's what Showtime is all about. An individual level is usually no longer than a few minutes and you can hit end credits in well under 10 hours. It's notably breezy and light in a year that has been marked by what feels like 27 different gargantuan, open-world RPGs. I respect that.
What I disliked about Princess Peach: Showtime
Detective Peach sucks
There's a healthy number of Peach costumes in Showtime relative to the game's length, but unfortunately, not all of them shine in the spotlight. Specifically, I'm talking about Detective Peach.
Detective Peach's stages revolve around deductive reasoning, which means you do a lot of talking to NPCs to solve simple puzzles. Her core mechanic is that she can investigate people and objects, and if the player senses something is amiss, they can use Peach's intuition to progress. Put another way, you just walk up to things and press the B button until the puzzle is solved.
These levels are slow and the puzzles aren't clever enough to be challenging in any meaningful way. I don't mind when games are easy, especially one that's clearly aimed at a younger audience, but you need to give me something to latch onto if that's going to be the case. Detective Peach's levels don't do that.
Not much meat on this bone
It's weird that I'm criticizing the game for being short when I just praised it for being short a few paragraphs ago, right? Bear with me.
I don't mind that Showtime can be finished in a weekend. What I do mind, however, is that no part of it is exceptional enough to make me want to engage with it after the credits rolled. Sure, you can 100 percent each stage by getting all the collectibles, but none of these stages are interesting enough to play twice. This is a game any adult should expect to plow through very quickly without ever revisiting it, for better and worse. If you'd rather spend $60 on something with more juice, I wouldn't blame you.
I also want to take a second to acknowledge the lack of multiplayer of any kind. Normally I wouldn't think twice about that, but Nintendo in particular has done a great job of giving parents various ways to play its single-player games with their kids. These modes aren't always deep or even especially good (Super Mario Odyssey had one player control Mario's hat, for instance), but they allow for some form of participation for both parent and child.
Princess Peach Showtime doesn't do that. It's sad, but what can you do?
Final thoughts
On its merits, Princess Peach: Showtime is a solid little adventure that never really feels essential. But then again, delicious sweets and treats aren't essential either, and we love those all the same. Its charming vibes and simple-but-fun mechanics are able to propel players to the end well enough, even if some of the levels are more fun than others and parents will be relegated to being spectators.
I think it's easy to look at this game as something of a disappointment because it's kind of the only big Switch exclusive revealed for 2024 so far, and it's distinctly not on the same level as a Tears of the Kingdom. But not every game can be that, and I'm not convinced they should even if they could. Princess Peach: Showtime is good enough for me. I just hope it's good enough for Nintendo to not wait 20 more years for a follow-up to it.
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