Donkey Kong Bananza: The Terrain Is the Toy

Most platformers treat the level as a fixed sculpture: the ground is where the ground is, the wall is where the wall is, and your job is to learn its shape well enough to move through it efficiently. Donkey Kong Bananza, which Nintendo EPD released in 2025 as a marquee title for Switch 2, throws that assumption out in the most literal way a platformer can: nearly every surface in the game can be punched, smashed, tunnelled through or torn apart, and the level you’re standing in at the end of a fight is rarely the level you started in.

Destruction as the verb, not the spectacle

Plenty of games have sold destructible environments as a graphical flourish — a wall that shatters when you shoot it, rubble that looks satisfying and does nothing else. Bananza treats destruction as the primary traversal verb. Donkey Kong’s punch doesn’t just clear an obstacle; it opens a new route, and the game’s levels are built with the expectation that you’ll dig sideways, downwards, and diagonally through terrain that a conventional platformer would render as unbreakable scenery. A cliff face isn’t a wall to route around, it’s raw material to tunnel through, and the game’s vertical layers — each with its own buried secrets, hidden pockets of currency, and alternate paths — only reveal themselves once you’ve started demolishing the layer above.

This is a genuinely different design problem from a normal 3D platformer’s, because a level designer working with destructible terrain can’t rely on the player approaching a space in a fixed order. Nintendo’s answer is to build levels as dense volumetric spaces rather than a single critical path with optional detours — closer to a voxel sandbox’s logic than Mario Odyssey’s carefully staged sightlines — and then use collectibles and terrain-quality variance (some rock types are harder to break, some crumble instantly) to guide the player’s attention without ever locking off routes with an invisible wall.

The transformation masks and what they solve

Scattered through the campaign are transformation masks that turn Donkey Kong into other forms for limited stretches — forms with their own movement rules and their own relationship to the destructible terrain. Where the base Kong form punches and tunnels, other forms might glide, roll at speed through soft ground, or interact with terrain types the base form can’t touch at all. The masks function the way a Mario power-up does — a temporary rule change that recontextualises the space around it — but because the terrain itself is mutable, each mask isn’t just granting a new verb, it’s granting a new way to permanently reshape the level you’re standing in. That’s a meaningfully bigger design lever than a fire flower ever pulled, since a Mario power-up changes what you can do to enemies and gaps, while a Bananza mask changes what the level itself is made of by the time you leave it.

Vertical layers as the actual level structure

The game’s world is organised into a series of increasingly deep vertical layers beneath the surface, and the choice to build progression downward rather than the more conventional forward-and-across layout matters more than it might first appear. Depth in Bananza carries an implicit promise a horizontal map doesn’t: everything below you is a place you haven’t looked yet, and everything above you is a place you can return to and dig further into if you missed something the first time through. That reversibility — the fact that yesterday’s fully explored layer can still hide a pocket you punched past without noticing — gives the collectible hunt a texture closer to genuine archaeology than the usual platformer habit of flagging every unclaimed item on a map screen. Nintendo resists that flagging instinct for long stretches, trusting the destructible terrain itself to reward a player’s curiosity rather than a UI element doing the noticing for them.

The ore and mineral variety buried in each layer also does quiet worldbuilding work: different rock strata carry different resistance to Kong’s punches, different colours, different associated hazards, and by the midgame a player has learned to read a wall’s material the way a seasoned platformer player reads a floor texture for whether it’s safe to stand on. It’s a small vocabulary, but Nintendo teaches it entirely through play rather than a tutorial pop-up, which is the house style EPD has favoured since the studio stopped explaining Mario’s abilities in text boxes.

Co-star and the second-player problem

Bananza includes a two-player mode where a second participant controls a companion character with a different, complementary skillset rather than a straight clone of Kong’s own toolkit — a design choice that keeps the second player from being pure company rather than content, a trap plenty of tacked-on co-op modes fall into. It’s a smaller-scale version of the collision Hazelight Studios builds entire games around, examined at length in Split Fiction: Hazelight’s two-player grammar — different tools, shared space, and a level that has to accommodate both approaches at once rather than favouring whichever player holds the primary controller.

The economy underneath the digging

Bananza layers a crafting and customisation economy on top of the pure traversal joy of digging, letting collected materials fund cosmetic and functional upgrades to Kong’s moveset. It’s a lighter-touch progression system than the genre’s crafting-heavy entries tend to run, deliberately so — the game seems aware that a deep itemisation system would compete with, rather than support, the pleasure of digging for its own sake, and keeps the economy shallow enough that a player is never staring at a menu deciding between six similar upgrades. Money and materials mostly fund small quality-of-life boosts and cosmetic variety rather than the kind of build-defining choices an RPG would hang a whole system on, which is the correct scope for a mechanic that exists to support exploration rather than replace it as the game’s main hook.

Where the destruction argues with itself

The trade a fully destructible world makes is legibility. When any surface might give way under a punch, the game has to work harder to signal what’s actually load-bearing to the plot’s progression versus what’s just decorative rubble waiting to be cleared, and Bananza doesn’t always land that signal cleanly — there are stretches where the correct route through a demolished space is genuinely unclear until you’ve tunnelled through three wrong directions first. The physics-driven destruction can also produce moments where falling debris interrupts a jump’s timing in a way that feels like bad luck rather than a fair read, a hazard that Nintendo’s own Tears of the Kingdom ran into from the opposite direction — a physics engine expressive enough to feel alive is also expressive enough to occasionally betray the player’s intent.

Boss encounters lean on the terrain-destruction gimmick hard enough that several late fights repeat the same “break the arena to expose the weak point” structure with cosmetic variation rather than a genuinely new idea, and by the campaign’s back third the novelty of watching a wall crumble has settled into expected texture rather than the game’s headline trick.

The difficulty of these late fights is also uneven in a way that traces back to the destructible arenas themselves: a boss whose weak point is buried behind terrain that takes three punches to clear reads as a puzzle the first time and a chore the third, once the player already knows the solution and is just waiting for the animation to let them execute it.

Kong’s voice and Nintendo’s confidence in it

Donkey Kong himself gets far more vocal personality here than any prior mainline appearance — grunts, roars and a handful of actual vocalised lines replace the near-silent mascot Nintendo has run since the arcade original — and the choice pays off because the destruction mechanic needs a physical performer with presence behind it. A quieter, more restrained Kong wouldn’t sell the sheer physical joy of tearing a mountainside apart with his bare hands the way this version does.

It’s a calculated risk for a character whose silence has been part of the mascot’s identity since 1981, and it works specifically because the vocal performance is calibrated to physical exertion rather than dialogue — Kong grunts when he punches and roars when he lands, which reads as an extension of the destruction mechanic rather than a bolt-on attempt to give him a personality he never previously needed.

The real ancestor

The obvious comparison is Nintendo’s own Odyssey and its capture mechanic, and the lineage is real — both games are fundamentally about temporarily changing what a level is willing to let you do. But the deeper ancestor is the voxel sandbox tradition Minecraft popularised and the physics-toy genre it spawned: games built around the premise that a world made of destructible, reconstructable material is inherently more interesting to explore than a fixed one, because the player’s own curiosity about “what happens if I dig here” becomes a genuine design input rather than an edge case the level designer has to patch over. Bananza is that philosophy given a AAA production budget, a beloved mascot, and — critically — a hard difficulty curve and combat encounters a pure sandbox never bothers to build, which is the trade that makes it a platformer first and a toy box second.

Spoilers below

The late-game reveal that the golden bananas powering the game’s central conflict are themselves fragments of an ancient, buried civilisation rather than a simple currency MacGuffin recontextualises the entire dig-everything structure retroactively — every tunnel the player has been carving for currency turns out to have been excavating the same lost culture the plot eventually asks you to reckon with directly. The final confrontation takes place in a boss arena that’s actively being destroyed and rebuilt around both combatants in real time, the clearest single statement the game makes that terrain destruction was always the actual subject the whole campaign had been building toward, and every earlier level’s demolition was rehearsal for this one.