Many color-matching puzzle games position the player as something somewhat detached from the game world, often taking the form of a cursor that can move blocks about or potentially just guiding the blocks themselves with their input. Wario’s Woods takes a less traveled road, the player getting directly involved in the movement of colored creatures and bombs by way of a character who runs about picking up and moving those pieces around. Although it might just seem like an injection of character into the color-matching gameplay you can expect from similar titles, having the character occupy space on the board and their need to navigate it is where much of the gameplay’s challenge comes from rather than it just being about the finding and execution of matches.

In Wario’s Woods, the goals of the individual modes can change, but you’re always presented with a board filled with a certain amount of colored creatures. To clear these creatures and finish the stage, you must match at least one bomb and at least one monster in an arrangement of four or more either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. To do this, you have a small character in the playfield, a mushroom-headed character named Toad who has a few ways to interact with the monsters and bombs. He can lift one at a time if they’re directly in front of him or a space below the area in front of him, he can lift up an entire pile by grabbing it from the bottom, he can place anything he’s holding in the space he’s currently standing in and pop up on top of it, and he can kick around anything on the same level as him to send it sliding across until it hits another piece or drops down, objects obeying gravity after a clear is made which is an odd specification to make but it’s not true of every puzzle game. Toad himself takes up the space of one bomb or creature, but he can navigate around the area pretty well, able to run up the side of even the largest piles so that you never get trapped in a pit. Toad can be defeated if the play area becomes too full and the next bomb or creature that drops in tries to fill the space Toad is in, so the goal is of course to clear all the creatures away with the bombs before that can happen.

The limitations of requiring a bomb for a clear give the game its unique feel when working in tandem with controlling Toad. Seeing a set-up for a clear is not the same as executing it, and sometimes Toad will have to rejigger an entire pile just to set up a decent match. Getting bigger matches or chains of matches can pay off differently depending on the situation, but one helpful result universal to all modes is the creation of a diamond of a certain color that, if matched with at least three other objects of the same color, clears all creatures of that hue from the board. The game tends to give you the diamond for the color you have the least amount left to clear, but the flip side to that limit is that Wario’s Woods will stop giving you certain bomb colors after you have cleared all objects of that color from the board. That is, unless Wario or a rival player sends trouble your way. While normally only bombs drop in from above to help with creature clearing, enemies in multiplayer and single-player can both send over creatures that will add to the amount you need to clear to win, but they pack a more dangerous skill as well. By shaking the screen or getting certain matches, your opposition can send down the ceiling of your play area, crowding out some of the free space that is desperately needed for your character to maneuver around in. With certain matches you can send it moving back up to give yourself room again, but death will most often come from a sudden surge down from the ceiling that leaves you with no space to move around and clear creatures.

At first, Wario’s Woods will only ask you to clear creatures with one of the three earlier mentioned methods, but as the difficulty rises, new creatures enter the fray that will push you to be more thoughtful in how you use your bombs. Some creatures begin to appear that can only be cleared in special ways, such as color-changing ones that require two bombs to beat, mushrooms that must be bombed twice in quick succession or they’ll revert to normal, and creatures that are only defeated by diagonal matches. The game seems smart not to mix too many of these complicated monsters together in a single stage because even if you become an expert at moving creatures and bombs about quickly, having too many variables in one play area with the time limits and threats of enemy interference would perhaps be much more hectic than this game is angling for. There is always some pressure to do things quickly, mostly because of that threat of interference if you take things slowly, but the game tries to avoid asking anything too complicated of a player so that they can handle the already present level of pressure.

The puzzle structure of Wario’s Woods is what carries the game’s quality on its back, and while the offerings have some decent depth thanks to the shakeups from enemy interference and the changing creature types, the element most integral to its identity is also possibly what holds it back from being much more. Toad walking about moving the pieces is what makes Wario’s Woods function as a color-matching concept, but it comes with a few caveats. Occupying physical space in the field can mean that an otherwise easy match can be tedious to arrange because of having to move aside hindrances, and in the later levels where the area is packed tight from the start this can be especially prevalent as bombs often drop in for colors buried below the upper layers. Making a junk pile to the sides to get what you need feels sloppy and slows down the matching, a problem having to move from place to place also causes. Climbing a huge pile is a necessary feature but not a great one, and if a piece falls down on you as you do so, you’re knocked back down to the bottom. A mercy comes in that you can drop down holding an object to potentially trigger matches on the way down, but the diagonal matches have their own issue. While it makes the character-based piece placing more effective and open to more matching opportunities, it can make the necessary rearranging a bit more complicated in a limiting way. Getting a bomb or monster from one area to another can potentially involve accidentally triggering a diagonal match, and while accidental matches can help in any puzzle game, it can also limit your ability to get bigger combos or important matches. Those special matches can be more necessary than usual when screen space is at a premium due to needing to move about and the threat of the ceiling potentially slamming down on you unless you can make the right matches to scare it back up. Funnily enough, a four piece diagonal match is the simplest way to make the ceiling go up a little, perhaps as concession to this design issue. Moving Toad about can be a bit of a finicky affair as well, in part due to his run being a fluid action. All objects in the game slot into a defined square of space except Toad, meaning he can be moving between them and this can lead to issues with precision as he might not line up perfectly with the rigidly defined spaces of the other objects. Essentially, everything moves on a grid except Toad and whatever he’s holding, and acting while on the lines of the grid instead of in a square seems required for some speedier moments but opens up room for error.

These problems don’t hold Wario’s Woods back from being a good puzzler though, and the game has a few modes that manage to keep it fresh even as you play round after round. In a somewhat odd choice, B-listers from the Super Mario franchise are given a spotlight in this title, with the princess’s servant Toad taking center stage to face Mario’s then-new rival Wario, Toad receiving help from a boss monster from Super Mario Bros. 2 named Birdo who has actually fought Toad in the past. Wario and his group of whimsically designed minions who will never be seen again have taken over the forest and Toad aims to make them pay in what feels like the game’s main single-player mode, VS COM. Here, the player plays best of five versus matches against the game itself, a procession of bosses challenging Toad to clear his board before they can. The monsters, despite working for Wario and presumably being evil, can flip flop from telling Toad he’s going down one second and giving him helpful pointers and encouragement in the very next sentence they say. Depending on which difficulty you choose, you can skip ahead to the harder foes first, that level skipping aspect also coming up in the game’s more tedious mode, Round Game. Round Game is a series of one hundred steadily harder game boards that steadily ramp up the difficulty but tend to pull it back every ten rounds or so as you hit a difficulty landmark where some aspect is changed like more enemies or different enemy types. While VS COM is a contest of beating another player by clearing the board first, here you just need to clear the board eventually without dying, although you have extra lives you can earn by being fast enough and Round Game lets you start from any five level milestone. The problem is the climb is fairly slow, the variety not able to sustain 100 consecutive rounds unless you really space out attempts.

For multiplayer, Wario’s Woods offers VS 2P, which is just VS COM but done with another human player with customizable difficulty per player to make it fun even for players of different skill levels. As you might expect, so long as you can figure out which difficulty level the players should play at, VS 2P will be about as enjoyable as VS COM can be unless you found that single player mode either far too easy or far too hard. Wario’s Woods final two modes are a Lesson mode with minor tests of your understanding of the game with instructions on more complicated maneuvers and a Time Race mode. Time Race comes in three difficulties across four different level types, the goal being to clear five screens quickly to earn some ranks. While the problem of having Toad in the play field can make regular matching a little odd, the game provides many forms of contextualization for play and options to approach it, alleviating some potential frustration by letting the player work on different modes and earn clear identifiable progress in them.

THE VERDICT: Running about as Toad in Wario’s Woods adds a dynamic to the color-matching puzzler that can make for tense moments of trying to land matches before an enemy interferes by limiting your area to move about in, but the limits on motion-based matching inherent to the system mean Wario’s Woods isn’t quite as snappy as a reactive puzzle game seems like it should be. Most of the time, sorting out the stacks of bombs and creatures for explosive combos works well, but when things get cramped, the limited motion can slow down the game and rob the player of their options for addressing the problem. Luckily, Wario’s Woods has many modes that test the player in different ways, pitting them against computer or human players, having them aim to finish as quickly as possible, or having them deal with interfering mischief of Wario himself. The options in how the game is structured can alleviate some of the issues with movement limitations, avoiding potential frustration by allowing the player to develop their skill across different game types.

And so, I give Wario’s Woods for the Super Nintendo…

A GOOD rating. Toad running around moving pieces gives Wario’s Woods its quirky identity, but unlike the odd boss characters and little creatures you have to clear, it comes with something that makes the game not quite as solid as a puzzle game needs to be. You can accommodate the fact Toad is not limited to the same grid as the objects and monsters, but with play so dependent on having open air for Toad to maneuver about in, you face some inevitable issues with cramped game screens, some levels even coming pre-cramped so it’s not entirely avoidable. Most of the time the matching goes well because the bombs are tossed in to match the level’s design, so it still has a foundation that supports the game’s style for the most part.

There is likely a reason the Wario’s Woods series was not really picked up for continued development and elaboration, because the need to navigate about the matching area sort of locks it in here, a good idea with some fun matching possibilities but the character movement gimmick holding it back from accessibility and evolving with the difficulty level. It did do a lot with what it had, the mode structures and new enemy types throwing in welcome new elements to the mix, but some greater balance of maneuverability feels like the step up Wario’s Woods would need to hit higher levels of greatness.