Whenever I first get to play a new Mario Kart game there’s always a moment – often when I reach a Bowser stage – where I look at the road ahead of me, the broad, curving path that leads through gorgeous Mario clutter, and I wish I was playing this as an action game, a platform game, instead of a driving game. What would that be like?
I don’t mind that it probably wouldn’t work, or that it works perfectly well as it is. I don’t fully know what I’m responding to, even. Maybe it’s the sense of being low to the ground in a world that unfurls towards the horizon, a world which is pushing me forwards to adventure. I don’t get this from actual 3D Mario games, which tend towards the toybox-like. But I get it from Penny’s Big Breakaway. In a strange, hard-to-pin-down manner, it’s the action game I want when I play Mario Kart.
This is weird, because the clearest lineage here is Sonic. With its play of speed and momentum and inertia, Penny’s Big Breakaway feels like a Sonic game moment-to-moment, and then there’s the personnel behind it, with Christian Whitehead and other Sonic Mania vets at the top of the credits. The colour scheme, favouring oranges and pinks and greens and purples calls to mind the 16-bit glory days of Sega. There’s a lot of Marble Zone to the look, even before later levels dump in all that lava. Coin collection gives off a distinct golden rings chime. Squint, and the characters scattered around the place, squat and rounded, could have come from Bonanza Bros, while Penny herself, all giant grin and sharp angles, feels like she could have stepped out of a Treasure game.
