SuperMash

I went into SuperMash fully ready to love it. The pitch is irresistible on paper: a PlayType console that procedurally smashes six retro genres together, spitting out a new micro-game every single run, complete with a randomised word-salad title like "Cute Assassination" or "Giggles & 5000". That kind of systemic ambition is exactly the thing I track across every genre I cover. The first couple of hours genuinely deliver on it. Picking two cartridges from Platformer, Action-Adventure, Shoot 'Em Up, Metrovania, Stealth, and JRPG, then watching the machine slap them into something unexpected, carries real novelty. A JRPG-Shoot 'Em Up that makes you open an Active Time Battle menu to fire missiles at incoming alien ships is mechanically absurd in the best possible way. A Stealth-Platformer that drops a Solid Snake stand-in into a side-scrolling level is good for at least one genuine laugh per session. The Dev Cards system adds a thin layer of build decision-making. You collect cards by completing Mashes and side-quests for your in-game store customers, then spend them to pin down specific protagonists, environments, or glitch modifiers before a run. Standard cards are single-use, while the rarer foil variants can be reused indefinitely. Glitches themselves are the most interesting mechanical wrinkle: they stack positive and negative modifiers onto a session, so one run might give you infinite lives every time you kill an enemy, while another sees enemies regenerating health faster than your damage output. The catch is you cannot switch glitches off, which occasionally tips a Mash from quirky into genuinely unfair. Procedural generation being what it is, you will also encounter the real variety of authentic bugs, not the intended "authentic bugs" the marketing describes: invisible characters on respawn, locked loading screens, and platformer physics that slam you straight down if you absorb a hit mid-air. The deeper structural problem, and the one most reviews converge on, is that the six genre templates are built around aesthetics rather than mechanics. Stealth is Metal Gear visuals. Action-Adventure is a faithful 8-bit Zelda replica. JRPG is Final Fantasy turn-based menus dropped into whatever context the other cartridge provides. Within about an hour of play you start recognising the same level layouts, the same two or three enemy types per genre, and the same trio of win conditions: collect a target number of items, kill a specified number of enemies, or find a specific character. The campaign wraps up somewhere in the eight-to-ten hour range and provides a pleasant pixel-art visual novel wrapper, with charming character dialogue between runs, but the story segments exist largely to funnel you back into more Mashes rather than escalate in any meaningful way. For strategy and sim fans who chase optimisation loops and expanding decision trees, SuperMash runs dry well before the credits. The Dev Dashboard gives you meaningful input for the first hour, then becomes a checklist rather than a genuine build layer. There is no difficulty curve that scales with player mastery, no late-game content unlocked by skill, and the campaign's narrative momentum does not compensate for the thinning gameplay variety. Where it does hold up is as a casual, low-commitment session game: each Mash lasts only a few minutes, load times are fast, and the Mash Code system lets you share a specific procedurally generated run with friends. Used that way, as a lightweight party curiosity or a quick distraction between longer titles, it earns its keep better than it does as a dedicated single-player experience. Diego, Scout Team

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