Princess Peach Showtime Review: Lights, camera, lack of action

Slightly-off Broadway.

While Princess Peach is a fixture of the Super Mario franchise as a whole, it’s been rare for her to step out on her own — the last Peach-centric title was almost two decades ago, with 2006’s Super Princess Peach on the Nintendo DS. In 2024, we finally have a second royal outing for our peachy protagonist, in Princess Peach Showtime.

The basic premise for Showtime sees Peach receiving an invite to Sparkle Theater, a mysterious venue hosting all kinds of plays. Things immediately go to hell, of course, with the arrival of Grape and her Sour Bunch, who begin taking over all the performances in the Theater and ruining the stories.

The Sparklas, the essence of the lead in each show, have also gone missing, leaving each story edited to be darker and unfulfilled. Essentially, it’s a case of “what if the Snyder Cut was the villain?”.

As she explores the theater, Peach meets a sentient ribbon named Stella, who begs her for help restoring it and its stories to their proper state. Each level of the game is presented as an act in a play, sent off the rails by the Sour Bunch. To help set things right, Stella aids Peach in using the Sparklas to become the lead of each story, using those abilities to restore the play to normal.

Ranging from kung fu master, to detective, to chef, and many more, each has a unique skill to help Peach interact with the world around her. The detective can search for clues, the cowgirl can lasso things from farther away, the superhero-esque Mighty Peach can lift giant objects and throw them, and so on. After clearing the plays on each floor of the theater, players will unlock a boss fight before being able to proceed.

These boss encounters show an impressive amount of variety compared to the left-to-right nature of the regular levels, challenging players to figure out a boss’ attack patterns and how to counteract them, where fodder enemies in the regular levels generally just need to be bonked over the head once to end things.

Typically, each new persona boils down to a single action mapped to the B button, and a standard jump on the A button. While some show a little bit more uniqueness like the ninja’s camouflage skill, for the most part you will find it’s just a different result of hitting the same button, regardless of what role Peach is embodying. It’s odd that in the context of Showtime, Peach can’t even run; she instead moves at the same stock-standard speed no matter what.

While this is not generally a problem within the levels due to their fairly snug level sizes, it does become a pain while navigating the floors of Sparkle Theater to move from level to level. Bizarrely, the game makes you trudge up and down the first three floors of the building manually to begin with, before adding an elevator on reaching the fourth floor – as though basic convenience of design is a reward to be offered, for all your drudgery.

While you’ll mostly be focussed on moving forwards and upwards as you knock out each level, the game does expect you to be hiking back down regularly. The ground floor features a shop that allows you to customise Peach and Stella’s look, and the basement contains bonus levels that unlock as you progress through the stages for each persona Peach can embody.

It’s odd choices like this that make the game feel less polished than you’d expect for a first-party Nintendo title, even towards the end of the Switch’s life cycle. I’m so used to Nintendo polishing their games to a mirror sheen, that it’s startling to see Princess Peach Showtime experience repeated frame rate stutters and long loading times for what are very tight, self-contained levels.

While the level of detail seen here is very impressive – Peach’s hair is so beautifully shiny that she must have a shampoo sponsorship from Pantene – it seems to come at the cost of optimisation. Every time the Princess acquired a new outfit, the cutscene that played would stutter without fail. A number of visual effects, notably in the Sparkle Theater hub, were clearly flat 2D animations with limited frames, making them stand out against the fairly consistent movements of Peach and co. around them.

It feels cynical to say, but it does feel like less care and attention have been paid in Showtime compared to a game centred on Peach’s favourite plumber might receive. Sure, this title may be targeted to a younger audience, but in 2024 I would hope we’re past the mindset of “for kids equals very simple”. Fortnite has proven that younger players have the capacity to utterly decimate us oldheads, and that game definitely has more than just two buttons to hit.

I don’t expect a Princess Peach game too require high-level strategy, but it feels like this game could at LEAST have met the complexity level of a regular Super Mario title that the very same target audience would be playing; as a follow-up to last year’s amazing Super Mario Wonder, it does feel like another fumble for our royal heroine.

Overall, Princess Peach Showtime did unfortunately leave me wanting. While it’s certainly great to have a game where you can knock out a level or two in a very short play session, doing so didn’t give me the drive or excitement to play more. I can see the kernel of a great game here, but with just enough things slightly off enough to be deterring. It feels like Nintendo hasn’t quite figured out how to make Princess Peach a viable lead.

While Super Princess Peach on the DS was criticised for reducing a female lead to being very literally controlled by her emotions, Princess Peach Showtime only works to allow her to embody so many different roles because there isn’t really a defined character underneath it all. For all its faults, 2023’s Super Mario Brothers Movie at least gave us a Peach who was driven, confident and capable – if Nintendo needs tips on how to build a Princess who could helm a game on her own, they should just ask Anya Taylor-Joy for tips. For now, I don’t see Showtime making it to Broadway – but I might still check out the matinee if there’s nothing else going on.

Princess Peach: Showtime was reviewed using a promotional code on Nintendo Switch, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.

Princess Peach Showtime 22 March 2024 Switch   Buy on Switch: Nintendo eShop, Amazon