Kirby and the Forgotten Land

Kirby has spent three decades as Nintendo’s designated easy game. That’s not an insult; it’s a design brief. The series has always been a laboratory for mechanics — inhale enemies, wear their powers, float over the parts you don’t like — wrapped in a difficulty curve engineered so a six-year-old never hits a wall. What made Kirby and the Forgotten Land genuinely surprising in 2022 was that HAL Laboratory took that brief into full 3D and didn’t flinch.

This is the studio’s first mainline 3D Kirby, and it arrives without the awkward transitional period most 2D franchises endure. There’s no Sonic Adventure camera nightmare here, no Super Mario 64 growing pains. HAL sidestepped the problem entirely by refusing to build a 3D platformer in the first place. The Forgotten Land is a collection of compact, semi-open stages — closer to Super Mario 3D World than Odyssey — where precision jumping matters far less than looking around corners. Kirby lands in a ruined, overgrown civilization of abandoned malls, dead factories and salt-bleached seaside resorts, chasing the Beast Pack to rescue kidnapped Waddle Dees. It’s a post-human world rendered in candy colors, and the tonal friction between those two ideas is the most interesting aesthetic decision Nintendo made that year.

Positioned as a family-friendly Switch exclusive with drop-in local co-op, it was aimed squarely at the household purchase — the game a parent plays with a kid — and it hits that target with unusual precision. The question is whether anyone outside that target gets enough to chew on.

• Mouthful Mode: Kirby engulfs oversized objects — a car, a vending machine, a staircase, a lightbulb, a traffic cone — and becomes a temporary bloated hybrid with a bespoke moveset. Each is a self-contained puzzle toy, used for a few minutes and retired before the joke wears thin.
• Upgradable Copy Abilities: The classic inhale-and-copy loop returns with Sword, Fire, Ranger, Drill and Hammer, but abilities now upgrade at Waddle Dee Town using Rare Stones and blueprints hidden in the field. Volcano Fire and Gigant Sword aren’t cosmetic — they change reach, hitboxes and pacing.
• Hidden Mission Objectives: Every stage conceals Waddle Dee cages plus a set of secret objectives that only reveal their text after you complete them. It’s a deliberately perverse design choice that turns a linear level into a second, invisible level.
• Waddle Dee Town: Rescued Dees physically rebuild a hub, unlocking shops, minigames, a fishing hut and a coliseum. Progress you can see, in a genre that usually settles for a percentage counter.
• Drop-In Local Co-Op: A second player joins at any moment as spear-wielding Bandana Waddle Dee. No menus, no lobby, no ceremony.

The Gameplay Loop

The structure is old-fashioned in the best way: world map, discrete stages, a boss at the end of each region. What HAL layered on top is a completion economy that’s smarter than it looks.

Each stage hands you three overlapping incentives. Rescue the caged Waddle Dees, because they’re the hard currency that gates world progression and rebuilds the hub. Find the blueprints, because they upgrade your abilities. And complete the secret missions — which you cannot read until you’ve already done them. That last mechanic is the design pivot the entire game rests on. If the missions were listed upfront, you’d play a checklist. Because they’re hidden, you play curiously: you shove the camera into corners, attack scenery, try the dumb idea. Most reveal themselves as “defeat the mini-boss without taking damage” or “find the hidden Waddle Dee behind the billboard,” and the reveal lands as a small, well-timed reward. It converts the tedium of 100% completion into something closer to play.

The moment-to-moment combat is where the extra dimension pays off. Copy abilities that felt like reskins in 2D become spatially distinct in 3D — Ranger turns Kirby into a third-person shooter with lock-on, Drill makes him a burrowing threat that attacks from below, Hammer is a slow, committed windup that demands you read enemy telegraphs. The upgrade system gives these abilities a progression arc that Kirby games have historically lacked, and the Rare Stone economy is tuned tightly enough that you’re always one or two upgrades short of what you want. That’s good scarcity design.

Mouthful Mode, and the Problem With Great Ideas

Mouthful Mode is the marquee feature and the most-quoted thing about this game, for good reason. The image of Kirby engulfing a sedan and waddling around as a horrifying pink car-creature is the kind of thing that sells a console. Mechanically, each transformation is a single-use puzzle verb: the vending machine fires cans as projectiles, the staircase lets you build bridges, the water balloon irrigates dead ground.

Here’s the honest critique. Mouthful Mode is a spectacle system, not a mechanical system. Each transformation appears in a curated stretch of level, does its one trick, and disappears. You never combine them, never carry them into open problem spaces, never discover a use HAL didn’t author. It’s Odyssey‘s capture mechanic with the improvisation surgically removed. That’s a defensible choice for a game designed to be played by children — it’s legible and impossible to fail — but it means the game’s headline feature is also its most disposable. The transformations delight and then leave.

Difficulty, and the Elephant in the Room

The main campaign is, bluntly, very easy. Kirby has a health bar that regenerates from food dropped constantly, floats indefinitely, and takes hits like a pillow. Deaths in the main story are more likely to come from accidentally walking into a pit than from any enemy encounter. There is a Wild Mode difficulty option, and by all appearances it barely moves the needle.

The real game — the one with teeth — is post-credits. Isolated Isles: Forgo Dreams remixes stages with meaningfully harder layouts and enemy placement, and the Colosseum stacks boss gauntlets that will actually kill you. That content is excellent. It’s also locked behind a long stretch of tutorial-adjacent platforming, which is a genuine barrier for an experienced player evaluating whether this is worth full price. HAL made a deliberate choice to sequence the challenge rather than let you select it, and the logic is understandable — the family audience never needs to see the hard version. But an unlockable difficulty toggle from hour one would have cost nothing and served everyone.

Co-Op and the Interface

Local co-op is a model of low friction. Player two picks up a Joy-Con and exists — no menu, no interruption. Bandana Waddle Dee is a competent spear fighter, not a hollow escort, and the game scales health rather than punishing you for bringing a less-skilled partner. It’s one of the friendliest implementations of “play with your kid” the platform has.

Waddle Dee Town is the connective tissue. Watching a barren field fill with shops, a fishing hut, minigames and a movie theater as you rescue more Dees gives progression a physical shape. Menu design throughout is clean, readable at a distance, and mercifully free of the tutorial popups that plague modern Nintendo titles.

The art direction is the sleeper achievement here. HAL renders collapse in pastel: shopping malls swallowed by ivy, a flooded amusement park, a rusting factory with sunlight cutting through the ceiling holes. It’s post-apocalypse without menace — closer to Nausicaä than The Last of Us — and the tension between abandoned civilization and Kirby’s aggressive cuteness gives the whole game a melancholy undertow it never verbalizes. The soundtrack matches, moving between bright bounce and wistful arrangements, and the boss themes rank among HAL’s best work.

Technically, it’s a mixed report on original Switch hardware. The game targets a modest frame rate, and in a 3D action game built around dodge timing that’s a real cost, not a spec-sheet quibble — responsiveness in the Colosseum’s tighter boss fights is where a 2D game of this scope would have felt lighter on hardware. The camera is the other recurring concern: mostly it’s on rails and behaves, but in enclosed arenas it fights for space, occasionally burying Kirby behind geometry mid-fight. Neither issue is disqualifying. Both are the kind of thing that matters more the better a player gets.

This is a Nintendo exclusive, full stop — there is no PC, mobile or other console version, and never will be. The original release is a Switch title, with a subsequent Switch 2 edition bundling additional content and improved performance for players on the newer hardware.

On the original Switch, handheld mode is arguably the better fit: the frame rate cap is less perceptible on a smaller display, and the game’s compact stage structure suits short sessions. Docked, the modest frame rate and resolution are more exposed on a large TV, though the art direction’s flat, saturated palette holds up far better than a photorealistic game would at the same specs. Joy-Con drift is worth flagging as a hardware caveat given how much of the game runs on analog aiming for Ranger and Mouthful Mode vehicles. For anyone with access to Switch 2 hardware, the enhanced edition is the version to buy — the performance improvements address the single most substantive technical criticism of the original.

HAL Laboratory pulled off the hard part. The jump to 3D — the thing that has broken better-resourced franchises — is handled with such quiet confidence that you barely notice it happening. The stages are shaped to be explored rather than survived, the art direction turns a well-worn ruined-world setting into something quietly moving, and the hidden-mission structure is a small piece of design cleverness that more games should steal.

What holds it back from greatness is a refusal to serve two audiences at once. The main campaign is a long victory lap, and the excellent, demanding content that follows is sequenced behind it rather than offered alongside. For the family audience this game was built for, that’s the correct call. For everyone else, it means the best version of Kirby and the Forgotten Land only starts after most players have already put the controller down.

Buy it for the household. Stay for the Colosseum. Just know you have to earn the good stuff.