It’s always fun when Nintendo starts playing around with crafty visual themes: the textile worlds of Yoshi’s Woolly World and Kirby’s Epic Yarn; the papercraft style of Paper Mario; the handmade feel of Yoshi’s Crafted World. It’s that same trend that Princess Peach: Showtime! joins, only this time, the craft is… stagecraft! The result is a rather charming theatrical adventure, although it doesn’t always live up to its potential.
Princess Peach’s plan to enjoy a rare moment of not being kidnapped with a night at the theatre goes awry when said theatre gets overtaken by the villainous Madame Grape. Jumping at the chance to play the starring role instead of a certain moustachioed plumber, Peach takes the stage to save the day—armed with the power of a good costume change.
Which brings us to the stagecraft theme. Showtime’s 30-odd levels span 10 different stage plays, each with a different costume for Peach, a different set, and by extension, different mechanics and abilities. In a Three Musketeers-esque swashbuckling adventure, Swordfighter Peach cuts her way through hordes of Sour Grapes in riff on classic arcade beat-em-ups. A different stage sees Patissiere Peach jumping into a series of bake-offs with a cake decorating minigame. In a good old whodunnit, the game turns into a detective adventure a la Ace Attorney (albeit more simplified).
And so it goes on. Ten plays, ten costumes, ten different minigames, with a couple of levels each to allow those ideas to develop a little bit. Most are some form of side scrolling action platformer, with the differences coming down to Peach’s different costume powers and how they let her interact with the stage around her. Even so, there’s still plenty of variety among them: acrobatically grappling through a level as a Dashing Thief is quite a different experience to sneaking around as a Ninja, even the underlying goals—move from A to B while solving puzzles and taking out every Sour Grape along the way—is the same.
With that setup comes all stuff you’d expect from a Nintendo platformer. There’s plenty of stuff to collect, optional challenges standing between you and said collectibles, bonus levels, and creative boss fights. The individual levels are short and sweet, and if you hurry through it you can see the credits roll in three or four hours (which is a blessing in itself, says the guy who played this around the same time as Rise of the Ronin and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth…). But if you’re the type to want to tidy up all the loose ends, Showtime offers good reason to replay.
As neat as these themed stages are, they’re not all created equal. The platformer (or at least platformer-adjacent) stages are where Princess Peach: Showtime is at its best, with clever level design that leans into and plays off the unique quirks of the costume. This is developer Good-Feel’s wheelhouse, after all. The less action-driven stages struggle to reach the same heights, despite being good ideas on paper. Cake decorating as Patissiere Peach never really evolves beyond using a piping bag to copy fairly simple patterns, and baking cookies is essentially a button-mashing minigame. Detective Peach suffers from puzzles that are, for the most part, blindingly obvious (keeping in mind that this is a game made with kids in mind), except for the odd couple where fuzzy dialogue makes sound deductive reasoning impossible. Those two examples are the outliers, but they still turn Showtime into an uneven experience.
The game’s other minor problem is brevity. As much as I appreciate its concise running time, Showtime feels a little too constrained when it comes to fully exploring its novelties. Each costume/show gets three levels, and typically quite brief ones. New design concepts and riffs on a given costume’s abilities are introduced often, but they don’t get enough time to breath, or to really develop to their full potential.
The Ninja levels are the clearest example of this: you’ve got a mix of stealth puzzles that combine hiding in cover, sneaking around enemies’ lines of sight, and misdirection; you’ve got platforming bits and navigational puzzles, often intertwined with the stealth bits; you’ve got autorunner shinobi setpieces across rooftops and falling buildings. None of these is a groundbreaking or complex idea in itself, but that’s a lot of stuff to squeeze into three levels that amount to 15 minutes of playing time. There’s no shortage of variety, but it also means that a lot of these ideas feel like a prelude to something bigger, something that never ends up arriving. There’s a lot of untapped potential left on the table.
Where Princess Peach: Showtime does live up to its concept is in its theatrical presentation. Every stage is exactly that: a stage, with wooden props, elaborate backdrops, mechanical stage contraptions, clever scene change tricks, and even audience noise and participation. It’s a little reminiscent of Yoshi’s Crafted World in the way it captures the look and feel of a very physical medium—”realistic” not in the sense of photorealism, but of atmosphere and presence. The result is a game that feels like a stage performance, even the bits that are happening “for real” as far as the narrative goes: Peach’s fights with Grape’s various minions play out like choreographed stage performances, even though they’re happening “for real” from Peach’s perspective. It’s a delightful effect, captured wonderfully.
It’s that sense of style and wealth of fun ideas that carry Princess Peach: Showtime through to the finish, despite its shortcomings. Sure, it won’t be a game for everyone, much like Nintendo’s other “quirky” spinoffs aren’t for everyone, and how much you get from it will depend on how much you vibe with the stagecraft theme. Yes, a lot of the game’s clever ideas leave boundaries unpushed. But Showtime takes a unique concept and has fun with it, lifting the curtain on an enjoyable night at the theatre.
Reviewed on Nintendo Switch with a review code provided by the publisher.
