Paper Mario: Color Splash review: Beauty at a finger swipe

As with much of the entertainment adults make for children, the seemingly harmless Paper Mario: Color Splash is rife with winkingly hostile moments, which are made imaginable by the proposition that people are paper. The game opens following a traumatic ink-letting involving three masked characters and a postal worker. Princess Peach is frightened after having received the postal worker’s drained corpse in the mail and decides this is a problem only a hero like Mario can solve. Using the postmark as a convenient reference, they trace the letter back to Port Prima, which, they discover upon arrival, has become a ghost town strewn with the blank white scraps of paper that used to be life. Fortunately, death is always reversible in cartoons, and soon enough Mario is launched on a familiar quest to hunt down Bowser — the series’ unkillable master villain who’s vexed Mario since Nintendo lore began in 1985.

— The Washington Post