Game Builder Garage review – Nintendo lets you loose on its building blocks

Switch; Nintendo
From Mario Kart racers to 2D platforms, this charming game-maker gives you access to the Nintendo toolkit

One of the most wonderful elements of Nintendo's Super Mario Maker titles, which give players the chance to build their own platformers, is that they provide a glimpse at how Nintendo thinks about game design. You get to see how every element matters, from the exact length of platforms, to the precise angle of Mario's jump. It's like going to a painting lesson with Picasso.

Game Builder Garage broadens the canvas offered by its predecessors by allowing users to construct pretty much any kind of game, from racers to 3D action adventures - all via a cute, powerful visual programming language. Here, the coding experience is represented on a graph paper screen, with each component, whether that's objects, actions or outcomes, represented as anthropomorphised blocks named Nodons, that you can pick up, move around and link together to create programs. Want to be able to move a character on screen? Simply select a Person Nodon, then an Input" Nodon and link them together. Each object has a series of properties, that can be switched on or off, making them, say, destructible, transparent and/or movable depending on their role in your masterpiece.