The Japanese-based development team at Good-Feel Co. and Nintendo have teamed up to bring us Princess Peach: Showtime!, featuring Princess Peach as the main protagonist for the first time since the 2005 game, Super Princess Peach. Flyers were handed out advertising for some plays at the Sparkle Theater, so Princess Peach headed down to check it out. Unknown to them, an evil sorceress by the name of Grape, and her minions called The Sour Bunch, took over the theatre and that’s when the adventure began.

During all the madness, Princess Peach loses her crown and meets the guardian of the theatre, Stellar, and you agree to help restore normality and take down the evil Sour Bunch. You control Princess Peach, who, like Mario, has some transformations as you go through each chapter.

You can be anything from Sword Fighting Peach, Detective Peach, Kung Fu Peach, and a few more, but I’ll let you play it to find out the rest. I’m seeing more and more length added to Nintendo Switch games, and I’m loving it. It really helps you to get more immersed. You are looking at about six hours to finish the main story, but there is also some post-game stuff you can do if you are so inclined to go back and get everything finished.

I love jumping into Switch titles for the convenience of being able to lay in bed or on the couch and hook into some great titles, but the controls always take me five or ten minutes to get used to. Again Princess Peach: Showtime! was one of the easiest ones, making use of little on-screen prompts when you need to learn something new, and the controls are super basic, making it an enjoyable game to play and something you could sit down and relax with. Of course, these worked well, either in docked mode or handheld.

Princess Peach: Showtime! is built on Unreal Engine 4 and looks fantastic on the Nintendo Switch. In true, form it’s a cartoonish 3D title, and the developers made sure to do a great job with each area of the game. We are starting to see these cartoon-like graphics getting crisper and more detailed, but remaining true to the art style.

I found myself putting the Nintendo Switch into the dock more often, playing on a larger TV screen and getting immersed in to the story, and it didn’t take away from the game in the slightest. It still ran great. I loved that each scene had different themes, with each looking great and sticking with the same style throughout. It didn’t feel like it had just been thrown together and put in to fill some areas.

I would have loved it if there was some spoken dialogue in the game, rather than having to read the text, and you’ll be talking to a lot of characters, but this isn’t the end of the world by any means, but I feel like it would have added some more depth to the story. As you roll around the theatre, some great jazz music plays in the background, taking you back and making you feel like you were in the 40s, and when you open up a dialogue with a character, they make a random little sound so you know you have prompted them.

Princess Peach mumbled a lot, but never actually spoke, which as I mentioned before, would have added some more depth to the story, especially in the cutscenes – while there was no voice acting, these were done super well. The sounds also differ, whether you are a cowgirl or a ninja, and this was highly appreciated, as each chapter had slightly different sounds and matched perfectly with the theme.

Princess Peach: Showtime! is a perfect game to sit down, relax, and get immersed in. It’s not super hard, and certainly not something you need to think about. You can just sit down and revisit characters you have grown to love, as well as meet new ones. As I mentioned before, the story is a little longer than most Nintendo Switch titles, but it will keep you immersed from start to finish.

Written by: Hayden Nelson