My friend @imtherealgibbon​ is a noted fan of NST’s work to succeed DK94 and keep the spirit of the old Donkey Kong puzzle-platformers alive. Inspired by his example, I sought out his recommendation: the fourth in the series, and the last one with a real “plot”.

Of course, my history with DKVine has left in me a residual sense of suspicion for these games. Our main ape DK is portrayed as wilful, selfish, possessive, and antagonistic. Now you could wave it away as brainwashing, or that this is a younger pre-Cranky DK Senior (there was some amount of developer intent early on for the latter). I tend to see it as an alternate perspective on the character within the Mario series, character traits that Rare’s DK does possess but taken to an extreme.

But anyway, it’s not really important. Miniland Mayhem is a refinement of the puzzley gameplay and level construction elements established in Minis March Again, but whose foundations can be seen since Famicom BASIC, to DK94, to the original Mario vs DK. It’s complicated. Suffice it to say, this is a game where you manipulate and build bits of a single-screen level to guide autonomous but mindless clockwork toys to safety. The wrapper for this is a Mario/Pauline/DK dynamic, set in a theme park; the setting doesn’t factor into gameplay too much outside the final boss battle but adds a little flavour to the backgrounds.

I get on with the gameplay very well. Managing the obstacles and paths for the adorable robots is intuitive with the touchscreen controls, and the challenge is excellently curved, with additional rewards in the form of more levels for good performance. The biggest surprise is after beating DK for the final time, when not only do you get a page of extra-hard bonus levels, but an entire Plus Mode which tasks you with doing the whole game again basically, but with a new challenging quirk. This is where the game’s demands exceeded my patience unfortunately but I appreciate the breadth of content available, which is enough for a complete game even though the entire “downloadable user-made levels” framework has been shut down.

It’s a fun game! NST may be second-class citizens in the Nintendo corporate hierarchy but they do good work. My main wish was for more frequent use of other Minis than Mario. One of eight levels in each set adds some of Toad, Peach, DK, and Pauline Minis and they’re all so cute. The amiibo game was good for this reason… if only it didn’t rely on amiibo.

Screenshot taken from GamesRadar.