"Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts."

Jumpman is the realest a gaming character's ever been. Feet, hop and time. One forward movement in space - or two, actually - pull(s) us back into the Kingdom, into its familiar rhythms and tunes ready to be upset by the variables of our inputs. It’s on.

"The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't."

So the very first thing I notice upon booting is the way Mario now enters a pipe, instead of reverting to a default pose he contextually transitions from a jump, ground-pound, run or even simple press of the down-arrow on your directional cross like the frames of a true hand-drawn, motion picture animated character; as the rush horizontally stuffs him into a tube, his cap remains suspended in midair for half-a-second, just enough time for us to notice and for him to grab it with one hand, finally penetrating deeper into the level. I use the word "penetration" here because I think it appropriately reflects the physical relationship the game wishes to establish at that moment between Mario and its environment; by so directly making a case of each entry and exit as cartoonish friction, Super Mario Bros. Wonder makes us notice, makes us remember what it felt like grabbing an old magazine on our way home from school, craving for this return to the digital world. This is a 2D-world given the scent of nostalgia and the depth of simulacrum.

"The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know."

These worlds are oases and therefore act as such. At their core hides a series of wonders for us to play through and into - onscreen fingers if you will, fiddling and remaking the very fabric of each level -, in doing so adding further splashes to the experience of interacting with this reactive plateau that isn't really one in the first place. The beautiful twist is that there is no twist - the oasis doesn't change, it fundamentally can't, but the space in which it occurs (its contextual aesthetic) is itself subject to change. Mario transforms into an elephant and suddenly flowers sprout anew in his wake. Collect some water, feed the earth. Collect another flower and this time the whole world finds a second life, rigidity now dictated by fluid motions. The box bends into a circle. Always, what's next. This distorsion of shape is the heartbeat of Super Mario Bros. Wonder because it is, in effect, a direct statement of power from the game to the player. This is what a wonder does. It's as if the levels themselves could now jump of their own accord. Wonder, wonderful.

"You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige".”

With Wonder I keep on circling around this thought that we've been participating in a wholesome fanfare, smearing us with coins and particles that leave little trace once the screen is shut. I don't doubt the soul-magic but its application, and so words like "joy" or "(re)invention" make a paranoid man outta me, make me feel like we're missing something amidst the obvious Nintendo wizardry that is at play here, trading-in the technicalities for visual spectacle and really is this Wonder any different than the bark of a trillion polygons rendered in open-world vanity. Worlds don’t have to react to me but I need to react to them. Wonder has a Spiderverse-sized problem - the second one - in the sense that its exhaustivity wears me thin with a certain excess of enthusiasm for the form. The sprite-like (near painterly) aspect of the presentation as Digital Foundry put it in their technical breakdown produces as many flourishes as it bloats out the possibility of any more complex game feel arising throughout the levels. First, every wonder interaction should come with a timer - or at the very least an incentive to urgency - that constrains the player into experiencing the "switch" as a proper play-capsule and second is the lack of punctuation in the placement of these events, less a suite spaced-out into crescendos that iterate upon what's come before than a supermarket stack of variations on the same exclamation mark. The platforming feels responsive, yes, bouncy like never before yet completely childish. This version of Mario is dedicated to the immediate response each press of a button must produce on screen, of which the movement system is a good example : spreading traversal options into badges limits both our range of expression and the level-design's complexity in ways that only become clear as the difficulty attempts to ramp up without ever truly peaking, precisely because you can only design so much around the limits of basically one extra-ability per-course, culminating in one of the most bog-standard incarnations of Bowser as a final boss yet in the series. This tale was also that of Breath of the Wild; craft alone cannot lend a strong sense of direction to the work, otherwise we end up with what amounts to an expensive technical demo - here, and time and again before this, sold to us as this expression of genuine videogame affection. So really, what are we talking about when we qualify Nintendo as one of the last bastions of true "play"? With every level we're flung into a new micro-dosed reality offering everything and nothing all at once. The projected value of imagination without practical gameplay applications of its aesthetic principle. Rainbow refreshes on stainless materials. And thus the Prestige is attained. These pixels bleed emotions, don't they?

Mario is magic. Always has, always will. But magic’s overrated anyway and the spell that binds us to the caster matters less in the end than knowing their hand was real in the first place. Super Mario Bros. Wonder feels wholly digital, like the type of image you could clip on an Instagram aesthetic feed to recall in ten years as a whole vibe that we got to collectively experience and then shuffle out of memory entirely. But the most frustrating aspect of it all is that Nintendo is so close to connecting the dots lyrically, the technological foundation is there, along with a troves of ideas and genuine artistic highs that would make this the kind of games I’d wished I played as a kid. At times the mind does wander, and you can see it all through the pastels. The bullrushes and the lollipop constellations. Fragments of true videogame. It's in the magma coastlines and the stone archways turning into blue hues of a dragon. A light-switch logic producing simple effects of relations between objects. Sometimes simple is best. Like pipework taking on a life of its own. That shit is so cool to me, but then it disappears, is never explored in a way that would allow their geometries to imprint themselves onto me past the next change of shape. The real trick was always the most straightforward one : you press a button and the wee-little guy jumps. What comes after that is pure, simple accessory to play. But it's what you do with that fact, how much you're willing to commit to it, that makes all the difference. Or in the words of Elpadaro F. Electronica Allah :

Extra honey in my tea but pay no homage to the bee
Whatever happened to us?
And will we ever come and let the magic tap into us?