Princess Peach: Showtime! review – the damsel in distress becomes an RPG queen

Princess Peach: Showtime! is unlike anything else. It shouldn’t be like anything else — the action-adventure game is only the second installment in Super Mario’s 43-year-old history to make Princess Peach its primary protagonist, and it treats her like a proper, petticoated hero. Usually, Mario main games turn Peach’s long skirt and little gloved hands into reasons why she’s best suited to being a fragile lily in a vase. But even ensconced in her majestic brick castle in the vast Mushroom Kingdom in which she rules, Peach is inevitably kidnapped by some irritating guy. In this sense, Nintendo has historically disparaged womanhood as Peach’s biggest liability. But Showtime! doesn’t do that.

It instead equates ribbons, dresses, and other types of girly-girl magic to legitimate tools. Sometimes, it even seems like Peach finds more power in salt-sized glitter than Bowser keeps stored in both of his beefy biceps. This helps establish Princess Peach: Showtime! as two things: first, it’s an innovative Super Mario installment. Then, it’s hot-pink respect finally paid to Peach, who has spent too much of her life bruising on the sidelines.

Outside its unique characterisation of Peach, Princess Peach: Showtime! is satisfying in its creative level design and varied styles of combat. This dynamism is demanded by Showtime!’s somewhat strange plot, in which life imitates art, which imitates life, which imitates magical realism in a Charlie Kaufman movie (except no one ever gets depressed, because their bodies are made up of 100 percent love).

Peach and her Toad countrymen have been invited to attend a play at the illustrious Sparkle Theater on the Theet species’ island. The lightbulb-nosed Theets – which act as the Theater’s patrons, workers, and actors, or “Sparklas” – are brand-new to the Mario series, as are the rest of Showtime!’s auxiliary characters and antagonists. Populating Showtime! entirely with unfamiliar characters (other than Peach) is a subtle but definitive way Showtime! forces players to identify with its leading lady, while also building out her niche in the franchise. I thought this was clever — the first Peach game, 2005’s Super Princess Peach for DS, was dismissed in some reviews for being aimed at a “less hardcore, girl audience,” as IGN put it at the time. Showtime! doesn’t leave enough space for misunderstanding. When you’re playing Showtime!, you don’t need to worry about being a girl, or a man, or anyone else. You’re Peach.

But before Peach can make it to her velvet chair in front of the stage, the Sparkle Theater is overrun by witchy new villain Grape and her roly-poly Sour Bunch. That’s right, a female villain! The Mario series has remarkably few, so Grape – with her flashy Venetian mask, and her floppy hat worthy of a stuck-up Gibson Girl – stands out. So, I’ll amend what I said before: while playing Showtime!, you have no gender, aside from Peach or Grape. Peach herself proves to be as malleable as hot sugar. To save the Theater, she needs to star in about 15 hours-worth of plays and save the Theets from Grape’s penchant for tragedy.

Instead of “plays,” it’s best to understand Showtime!’s 35 levels as mini-planets with their own physics and politics. After entering a stage door, Peach’s reality will shift to reflect the 2.5D set she stepped into. This wouldn’t be possible without Stella, Peach’s new companion, and the Theater’s “Sparkle sprite” guardian whose body is a long, tied ribbon. Stella allows Peach to use Sparkle as a force of good, so, when I press B on my Switch, her starlight sizzles, and her ribbon uncurls. Twirling it all around, I can do different kinds of Good Samaritanism, like ripen strawberries for cake, fill downcast Theets with confidence, or coax coins – which buy me new dress patterns – from their hiding spots.

This is only the scullery floor of Peach’s power. There are ultimately 10 starring roles Peach can take on, each with its own outfit and moveset, much like a typical Kirby game. Swordfighter Peach, for example, slaps a wildly plumed hat on her head and sword hilt in her hand, empowering her to whack orb-headed Sour Grape henchmen and free the poor Theets they imprison. Kung Fu Peach, with the artificial tang of her orange eyeshadow, is especially agile, and so she hops on candy-striped poles like she’s in Lollipop Chainsaw and not a game rated E10+ for Everyone, smacking away enemy hordes with her pointed toes.

Some Peach transformations, like Patisserie Peach, who hangs out wearing Dutch braids as thick as honey buns, are more clearly aimed at younger fans. Every Patisserie Peach level requires you squeeze buttercream out of a tube the same size as a multi-level townhome and pipe a cake, sometimes with decorations as simple as a single, straight line. Combat-free Detective Peach levels, in which your health bar is tied to your ability to detect clues, likewise have little mystery to them, so long as you are old enough to read a Nancy Drew novel by yourself.

But the theater backdrops and creatures, like painted tortoises that look like they’re made of unvarnished plywood, or tufts of crisp cardboard fire, have the same tactile appeal of universally celebrated games Paper Mario and Yoshi’s Crafted World. The variation in level design – from more typical Mario stuff, punching out enemies while jumping on distant platforms, to point-and-click detective work, and casual rhythm games played with fish – is exciting. The more I played Showtime!, the more I looked forward to Peach’s future. It was no longer doomed with dead-end kidnapping; it had become a spilling basket of sweet possibility.

I ended up running around Sparkle Theater fueled by self-determinism. There were thousands of coins weighing down my pockets, and I’d been racking up collectible, turquoise Sparkle Gems that unlock each boss room (there are five idiosyncratic fights, one for each floor in the lavish theater). I stop by the shop in the lobby and select a dress with wide white stripes, like Beetlejuice. Peach has pulled her hair into a battle-ready ponytail, and I rush her toward another level while she lifts the edge of her heavy skirt.

Honestly, I’m reminded of Valerie Solanas – the radical feminist writer best known for unapologetically shooting Andy Warhol in 1968 – who defined the slimy struggle against patriarchy in her 1967 SCUM manifesto, an instruction manual on eliminating men for the sake of world peace. I’m thinking about this because Showtime! is a world without men — there are male Theets with plasticky mustaches, sure, but no “men” in the Warhol or Mario sense.

Solanas writes that the first type of man-obsessed woman “[sees] the female as worm,” but true SCUM “consider themselves fit to rule the universe.” With more grace and pacifism (thank God), Princess Peach: Showtime! lets Peach move closer to this more boisterous, commander-of-the-galaxy kind of woman. She’s spinning into being a girl with some agency. And she doesn’t even need a gun.

Before, Peach could hardly control herself, armed or not. Her emotions formed the root of her strength in Super Princess Peach. It wasn’t a bad idea; it’s healthy to let feelings flood, sometimes. But, up until that point, Nintendo had barely indicated that Peach was any more than a vessel for feeling – whether hers, or the boiling emotion in Bowser, who has been desperate to get her in a vanilla wedding dress for decades. 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie worked harder to show Peach as a lithe and loyal princess, skilled at defending herself and her best friends, but it nevertheless put Peach back in her dreaded place: in front of her stalker Bowser, wearing a white gown she had no desire to be in.

Princess Peach: Showtime! allows Peach to wear whatever she feels like. She can sing, or swim. She can fight through stealth, or brute force. All of Showtime!’s variation and tenderness stops it from ever becoming a boring “girlboss” game – Peach wants, more than anything, to save the plucky Theets from harm, and protect the sanctity of their theater. Showtime! never tries to manufacture some artificial connection to manhood and its associates: domination, coarseness, cruelty. Women are not worms. They’re limitless. Some of them have wet, wide eyes and smooth swatches of silk, and it’s not embarrassing or childish – it’s the product of soft, eloquent desire.

Princess Peach has always had this sentimentality, and a wish to be a benevolent leader, so Showtime! is feminine by necessity. Outside of the castle, there’s more space to be gentle. “There was / a peach in a wicker basket / There was a bowl of fruit,” writes Louise Glück in the 2001 poem “Ripe Peach.” “Fifty years. Such a long walk / from the door to the table.” Finally, Peach gets to rule.

A copy of Princess Peach: Showtime! was provided for review by Nintendo.