Kirby and the Forgotten Land is as sweet and slight as cotton candy

theverge.com:

Kirby and The Forgotten Land feels like the kind of game made for this moment in 2022. I imagine a dark basement at Nintendo HQ where a group of people are monitoring world affairs and whenever it gets too dire, they hit a big red button that says “UNLEASH THE CUTE.” It happened with Animal Crossing: New Horizons at the onset of the pandemic in 2020 and it’s happening again now. But, unlike Animal Crossing, I don’t feel like Kirby and The Forgotten Land has the same kind of staying power to get us through this particular grim bit of world history. It’s a nice distraction that’s fun to play for a couple of hours but it doesn’t really have enough to keep you hooked.

In Kirby and the Forgotten Land, you play as the titular pink blob of indeterminate origin, power, and motivation. As he merrily goes about, doing whatever it is a God-child of indescribable power does, he’s swept up in a storm that takes him to a land that looks like a post-apocalyptic Earth analogue. There, he learns long-time enemies now erstwhile friends Waddle Dees have been captured by a pack of beasts and it’s up to him to save them. Along the way, God-child Kirby makes use of his prolific appetite to swallow all kinds of objects that help him rescue his friends.

I’ll confess that I’ve never played a Kirby game (although, oddly, he is my go-to in Smash Bros.). I don’t know why, outside of nostalgia, people have an affinity for this franchise. But I think, after my time with Forgotten Land, I do have a bit of an understanding: this is the cutest damned video game I have played since… Animal Crossing.

There is such joy in this game that it’s infectious. Kirby is always smiling and laughing. As your home base slowly fills with the Waddle Dees you save,