Even Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s approach to difficulty is playful

theverge.com:

By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

When it comes to difficulty, most games like to put you in a bucket. At the start of the experience, you have to choose whether you want to play on a hard or easy mode, and usually, over the course of the game, you can move between these as you see fit, which is good because it’s hard to really know what mode is right for you at the beginning. Super Mario Bros. Wonder doesn’t force you to make this decision. It doesn’t have traditional difficulty settings at all. And yet, its approach to difficulty is one of the most refreshing I’ve ever seen — it’s both subtle and powerful and as playful as the rest of the game.

The most obvious form this takes is in the characters you can play as. The main cast of Mario and friends are all basically the same, but there are a handful of characters — Nabbit and all the various flavors of Yoshi — that serve as a default easy mode. None of them can be damaged, and in the case of Yoshi, you also get a better jump and an additional attack thanks to his extendable tongue. Other characters can ride on a Yoshi; I used this to great effect to piggyback my eight-year-old kid through some of the more perilous platforming sequences.

That’s a great start, but the game goes a few steps further. Most notable are the badges, which are special skills you can unlock and equip. You can only use one at a time, but they’re pretty powerful. Some give you a higher jump or faster run; one gives you a retractable vine that’s basically a grappling hook. Others are much more helpful for beginners: the “Add! Blocks” badge inserts additional