Super Mario Maker’s genius lies in making creation feel like a game. Building your own 2D Mario levels may sound like a complex business, but Nintendo throws open its tool box in the only way Nintendo knows how, with simplicity and giddy playfulness. I say tool box, but Mario Maker often feels more like painting. You can meticulously craft something –a level of perfect momentum, gaps and enemy placement-- or you can splatter the canvas with stuff and things and more stuff and still come out with something playable.

Not everything has to be a work of art, then, but however you approach it, Super Mario Maker makes making fun. You choose a style, which initially gives you the option of the original Super Mario Bros. or the modern New Super Mario Bros. but later expands to the games in between. Mario’s skills also match in turn, basic hops and momentum for Super Mario Bros., wall jumps and butt bumps for New. You can flick between styles at any point while building, meaning you are never locked into a particular style if inspiration strikes halfway through. Similarly you can cycle through backdrops: open-air, underground, underwater, scrolling air-ships, castles, ghost houses.

The palette for your level elements is placed along the top of the screen. Using the gamepad’s touchscreen, you can drag and drop individual objects –enemies, question mark blocks, power-ups-- or continuously draw with your stylus, daubing in ground and towers of brickwork.

The basics are effortless and presented with customary Nintendo wit. The background music noodles away while you build, and as you place an item a distorted voice sings its name in tune. I spent a good 20 minutes just mucking around with this, dropping elements as the game sang“question maaaark, question maark, Lakitu, mushroooom, brick, TRAMPOLIIIIINNEEE”. The deletion tool is a boinging eraser, and resetting a level has you sending off a rocket to send the whole thing crashing down. Undo is a barking dog. Why? Why not?

Even item modifications have little tricks to make you smile. Fill item blocks with power-ups or baddies by dragging them in. Pick up a Koopa Troopa and give him a good shake to change his colour. Want to make him a giant? Feed him a super mushroom of course. Very little is tucked into menus, rather everything is lively and tactile.

These little touches are what keep you grinning while you build your levels, but Nintendo are smart with the practicalities too. Frivolous as some of Mario Maker may seem, it ensures you have the tools you need to build some cracking levels. You can immediately switch to play mode to test your creation, turning on a trail to show you the arcs of your jumps so you can tweak platforms and enemy placements to ensure your stage has the perfect flow.

There are an enormous amount of items to wade through – enemies, bullet bill firing cannons, spiralling fire ropes, spikes, power-ups—and it is one of Nintendo’s potentially more contentious decisions is to make them available in a drip feed. You start out with just a handful of the basic items and more are made available for every day you spend some time in the Creation mode. Many will surely come into Mario Maker wanting the whole suite available from the outset, which isn’t an unreasonable view, but Nintendo’s idea is one of tutelage. “Here are your items for today,” it says, “and here’s an example stage using them. Off you go”.

Nintendo, for all of its giddy playfulness, likes to provide a guiding hand, making sure you are learning about its systems incrementally. This has been a facet of Mario for the last 30 years. The Super Mushroom in World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. is famously unavoidable, showing you how it causes Mario to grow. Each carefully planted goomba, pipe and bottomless pit thereafter is a lesson in how to play. It is natural that extends to lessons in how to build.

In fact, Super Mario Maker throws a fascinating light onto three decades of design. One of the surprises of Super Mario Maker is just how easy it is to build a working level. But perhaps it shouldn’t be a shock. While there are some differences in the play-styles of each era available, the spine always remains the same: the exuberant momentum and precision of that famous plumber. Everything else fits in around him. That each asset Nintendo creates should slot so comfortably into an existing system is exactly why Mario remains peerless in his genre. In some ways creator Shigeru Miyamoto nailed it in 1985, everything else since is happy embellishment.

Of course, while making a playable level is easy, crafting a great one is something else entirely. Nintendo show you how it’s done with its in-built 10-Mario Challenge, which serves up a selection of pre-made levels that you need to finish off with a stock of 10 lives. These vary from remixes of classic levels from the series history to quirky, bite-sized challenges like making your way through a maze of doors or taking out a tower of enemies piled higgledy-piggledy on top of one another.

But as inventive as Nintendo are in the 10-Mario Challenge, this is nothing compared to the brilliance, deviousness and sheer insanity of the levels provided by Mario Maker’s users. Smartly made A-to-B levels are there, of course, but the most fascinating creations so far are deconstructions of Super Mario’s skill set, hiving off individual elements of his control and building an idea around them. One fire flower-powered level turns Mario into a side-scrolling shoot ‘em up. One is called simply ‘Vertical Bowling’, in which you throw POW blocks and Bob-ombs into a gaggle of enemies overhead; record your score at the end. Another spells out maths problems in blocks, enforces a time limit with a speeding platform before presenting you with paths and multiple choice answers; get it right and you’re on to the next one, get it wrong and you run into spikes.

There are practical jokes, near-impossible tests of platforming dexterity and even a mass of autoruns: bewildering Heath Robinson contraptions that send Mario on a fairground ride via platforms and trampolines without you even touching the controller. In fact, the latter are a bit toopopular –the joy of Mario is in play, after all, not observation—but do have the mark of ingenious construction.

It is, in short, brilliantly bonkers. Bearing in mind these are from pre-release players, I’m fascinated –and a little frightened—to discover what the general population will come up with. Nintendo seem to have a smart handle on curation too in the ‘Course World’. New levels that Nintendo like are placed in a Featured tab, while you can give a star to courses you like and the highest ranked levels are organised in a different column. Suggested courses roll over the top and bottom of the screen after you complete a stage. The best ‘Makers’ have their own sections so you can explore creations from people whose work you have enjoyed. And if you want something more random, the 100-Mario Challenge gives you a stock of lives and throws courses at you with abandon.

There will be no shortage of levels to play and you are rarely far from discovering a new idea. If there’s a complaint, it’s that it is naturally all a bit disparate. One of the pleasures of Mario games is the progression that the ‘Worlds’ and map brings: a connected journey for our plucky plumber. With no way to join stages into worlds, it lacks that coherence.

Never mind. Super Mario Maker’s chaotic smorgasbord is part of its appeal. Wild, unbridled and even inspiring, Super Mario Maker achieves the envious feat of making both Play and Creation a joy. And all it had to do was remove the barrier between the two.

Formats Wii U

Developer Nintendo

Publisher Nintendo

Released 11 September