Video games have come a very long way from the old days of the NES, but one thing that can always be said of the industry is that it never forgets its roots. Even today, game catalogs are rife with references and homages to the days of yore, from indie classics like Shovel Knight to big name titles like Super Mario Maker, a game which let players recreate the classic origins of Nintendo's most famous character in the most literal way possible. SuperMash is a very unique take on the idea of revisiting gaming's past, and it's proof that sometimes one shouldn't meddle with the past.
The conceit of SuperMash is relatively simple. The player is given six classic game genres: Action Adventure, JRPG, Platformer, Shoot 'Em Up, "Metrovania," and Stealth. The player selects up to two of these genres to play at once, and a level is generated for them, with randomized items, abilities, and objectives. These "Mashes" tend to run around five to ten minutes. The draw of the game is that one will never play the same game twice; even if you mash the same two genres, everything will be randomized differently. Each genre has different maps, characters, and enemies which are tossed together haphazardly every time the player starts a new level.
While this premise seems to indicate a wide array of variety, the Mashes start to run together very quickly. The gameplay types of the two genres you mash are rarely if ever combined in interesting or engaging ways; generally you'll simply be playing one type of game as the protagonist of another. And while moving around a JRPG fantasy landscape as a jet fighter is an amusing novelty, it doesn't do much to make the experience more interesting or engaging. In fact, the randomized elements often get in the way of the gameplay more than they improve it. This is especially true of the JRPG genre; regardless of what other genre is present, the protagonists' stats and abilities are completely randomized. This can result in characters that are, in one form or another, total dead weight, like a character who hits for low damage and has a magic bar far too low to cast any of their spells.
Another form of randomization that the game includes to shake things up are Glitches. At the start of each Mash, the player will be assigned a number of glitches dependent on the difficulty they've chosen. At the start of each mash you get a certain number of positive glitches and a certain number of negative ones, and to their credit they do impact the gameplay in deeply significant ways. Unfortunately, this is rarely a good thing. There many different glitches in the game but very few of them impact the gameplay in a way that actually improves the experience.
The negative glitches can range from being mildly annoying to completely debilitating, running the gamut from tilting the screen slightly to flooding a JRPG encounter with a sea of enemies or forcing the player to jump at random times in a platformer. On the other end of the spectrum, the positive glitches tend to either be totally irrelevant or completely overpowered. One could be playing a JRPG where the entire party is healed for more than their maximum health every time they take a hit, or have a shoot 'em up where every enemy on screen dies every time you fire your weapon. There is no way to know what will trigger them until it happens in-game, making it entirely impossible to plan your run around the changes they'll give you. To make matters worse, there are entirely too many possible triggers, and some of them make absolutely no sense. One Mash might see the player dropping their weapon every time they move left, or taking damage whenever they fire their weapon while jumping. Any amount of consistency with regards to the glitches would have only improved the experience.
Unfortunately, not all the glitches in SuperMash are actual game mechanics. This is a very buggy game, and it's not uncommon for mashes to be rendered entirely unplayable because of it. The game could task you with defeating multiple waves of enemies and then refuse to spawn wave 2. It could put you in a shoot 'em up screen with nothing to shoot at. It could put a quest objective behind a wall of rocks and then refuse to give you a tool to break those rocks. Or it could just crash.
The big problem with SuperMash is that even when the game's random elements behave, it just isn't a very fun game. None of the base genres are as good as the games they pay tribute to, and this doesn't change when they're combined. Playing a Zelda ripoff as an off-brand Solid Snake isn't ever going to be as fun as just playing Mario. The very best mashes this game can produce feel like amateur flash games, which can be good fun in their own right but which rarely, if ever, hold a candle to the classic greats. At the end of the day, if you feel like revisiting the wonderful games that made the industry what it is today, there are so many better ways to do it than by sitting down with SuperMash and trying to cram them together.
SuperMash is available now on PC. A PC code was provided for purposes of review.