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Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker hits a great balance of challenge and charm—right up until one particularly brutal level nearly made me quit.

In a land where lies carry consequences long after they’re spoken, the party encounters a mother and her changed son. When the boy turns violent, Runtar is forced to make a difficult choice, and is left wondering whether some costs can ever be undone, or only endured.

I’m still not sure if I liked Lumo or hated it—clever puzzles kept me going to the end, but constant deaths and that awful death noise made it hard to truly enjoy.

Following a map Bawbaggins recovered from the pirate ship, the party reaches a quiet beach marked by ancient standing stones and a carved riddle. Giant crabs interrupt the investigation, and somewhere in the chaos Runtar finds himself compelled to dance… before everything goes dark. When he wakes, the crabs are dead, the riddle is solved, and the stones have revealed a second map.

Not wanting to buy another game, I raided my six-year-old’s cartridge collection and rediscovered Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. The story mode’s mix of puzzles and turn-based battles ended up being far more enjoyable than I expected.

When a whirlpool summons undead pirates and something vast beneath the waves, survival becomes the only goal. Gloom shields Runtar, a parrot terrorises Bawbaggins, and even a barrel of Chrisgles fails to soothe the deep. Sometimes victory means simply getting away.