More than that, though, there is the hope that the Octo Expansion's charmingly barmy story will start to make sense, that the aesthetic nods from The Matrix will converge with chirpy talking telephones and a palpable sense of dread and claustrophobia. The rewards are extravagant: new Splatoon gear to be unlocked and, upon victory, the chance to play Splatoon 2 as an Octoling instead of an Inkling. Splatoon single-player levels are rather beautiful things. Work your way through enough test chambers and you may locate the four doohickeys that open up the path back to the surface. You are cast as an Octoling who finds themselves buried deep beneath Inkopolis, lost on some kind of hellish transit system where each station on the underground contains a test chamber that must be completed. It's 80 challenge levels of hard, according to someone who has counted this stuff, in which you play Splatoon 2 in a way you have likely never played it before. It's that they're jerks about it.Īnyway, the Octo Expansion is hard. The Lost Levels introduce an element of unreliability. And that wind? That wind picks up out of nowhere and messes your jumps - jumps which you have planned and executed perfectly, because this is Super Mario Bros, and its world always used to make sense, always used to be reliable.
Poison mushrooms are the chance for something bad to happen in a game that previously thrummed with the potential that something good might happen. They are a thrill to think about, but a chore and a bore to play. With the benefit of time, let me announce my final position on The Lost Levels. Games used to be like this: a thing of rumours and blurred photographs. Just one glimpse of that poison mushroom in an old Mean Machines would have been enough to send me into sweet delirium. Imagine, a sort of pseudo-sequel to Super Mario Bros with a handful of new gimmicks: poison mushrooms, wind that has to be factored in to platforming. I loved them when I first played them, but that's because they were so hard to get hold of for a while. In reality, though, they are kind of annoying. The Lost Levels are great - on paper, at least. I will be honest: my worry, for the first few hours, is that Octo Expansion, the new single-player DLC for Splatoon 2, was going to be Splatoon 2: The Lost Levels. Nintendo's trickiest game in years is also one of its most joyful.
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