Another Princess Is In Our Castle: Peaches Castle Realized

While doing my weekly run through of Itch and Steam, something hit my nostalgia like nothing has before. With that incredibly bright and bold child-like font, if you have looked at a Nintendo 64, you know this game. It is, of course, the groundbreaking Super Mario 64.

Another Princess Is In Our Castle is something that growing up, I had fever dreams about to a certain degree. For the unknowing, there is a basement hallway in Super Mario 64 that you chase a Boo down. Only to have it go through a wall leading to the outside. When you open the door to the garden area, you are met with just a smattering of Boos. In Super Mario 64, one of them has a level hidden in it. But as a teen, I always wondered if the ghosts turned just super evil and started haunting Mario. 

Well, that’s not too far off the premise of Another Princess Is In Our Castle. In Another Princess Is In Our Castle, Mario decides to head back to the castle from my childhood. Only in this version, Princess Peach died a few years ago, and when Mario enters the castle, things aren’t quite right.

A few things of note, this is apparently a demo, so if Nintendo doesn’t come down hard on it. However, as we all know how Nintendo does,  hopefully, we get to see a fully fleshed-out version. Also, there are difficulty settings that affect basically how well the “presence” can find and hear you.

When you start in first person seeing the castle for me just really rushed me back to playing SM64, and crossing the barrier and opening the castle doors really had me running on full nostalgia. Once you enter, though, you clearly see that this will be a game of stealth. There are treasure chests you can hide in with the goal of collecting eight stars. 

Well, I say stars, but it’s really ghost statues of memories of the castle from Super Mario 64. Once you collect the first one, the hunt begins, and Princess Peach herself, well, some form of demonic Peach, tries to hunt you down.

The gameplay is pretty simple. Just using a mix of stealth and managing your stamina bar, you can collect all the items. The placement of these items and the objects themselves are a nice touch. For anyone who has played Super Mario 64, you’ll be able to equate these items to their locations immediately. 

But once you get your eight items, it’s to the basement, and it is over. It was an interesting experience in how nostalgia in the right hands can be a fun experience to mess around with. Also, I think CM9 Animation did an outstanding job with the sounds of  Another Princess Is In Our Castle. Specifically, the Princess herself has a pretty freaky guttural growl to her when she does see you.

After doing Machinima for Super Mario 64 on and off for the past few years, with the last year being his most active, I’m happy I got to go on this fun jog down memory lane with  Another Princess Is In Our Castle. I hope we get updates and expanded versions of the castle. It was a fascinating take on the whole Slenderman eight pages thing. If you have any nostalgia at all for the original game, you should check out  Another Princess Is In Our Castle. Would I have enjoyed this if I didn’t have a love for SM64? That’s debatable, but still, it was a fun time to see the castle in a spooky first-person setting while a dead Princess Peach chased me around.

Check  Another Princess Is In Our Castle for yourself at Itch.io, and make sure to go check out CM9 Animations YouTube page to watch some of their Machinima!

For more previews, reviews and interviews, stay locked to DreadXP, and I can push this enough. If you like Horror at all, go play Mortuary Assistant!

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