Somebody over at MSN put together a list of five games to play if you loved Super Mario Odyssey, and it got me thinking about what Odyssey actually is. It's a toy box. Nintendo took decades of platforming knowledge and threw every idea at the wall, and somehow almost all of it sticks. Cappy is still one of the best mechanics the series ever produced, and I'd argue the capture mechanic alone does more with possession than a dozen games that made it their whole premise.

So if you've drained Odyssey dry and want more of that feeling, here are my picks in the same spirit, with the MSN piece as the jumping-off point.

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury is the easy first call. Bowser's Fury especially is the closest thing to a bite-sized Odyssey, an open-ended lake of objectives with a kaiju Bowser stomping around the edges and wrecking your plans on his own schedule. It was an appetizer that accidentally outclassed some full meals.

A Hat in Time is the obvious indie pick. Gears for Breakfast built a love letter to 64-era and GameCube-era 3D platformers, and it has that same joyful density, every corner hiding a badge or a time rift or a weird little story beat. If Odyssey left you wanting more personality per square foot, this is your game.

Psychonauts 2 earns a slot too, and I'll co-sign that one hard. Double Fine's platforming is fine, but the level design imagination is off the charts, and Odyssey fans will recognize the appeal of worlds built around a single strong idea rather than raw square footage.

The through-line with any of these is movement and collectathon DNA, which is the right instinct. Odyssey's genius isn't the cap throws or the moons. It's the flow, the way Mario carves through a level once you've internalized the movement tech. Any game that respects momentum the way Nintendo does belongs in this conversation.

My own addition, for what it's worth: go back and play Super Mario Galaxy 2 if you somehow skipped it. It landed in 2010, and yes, it still holds up. Odyssey gets called the best 3D Mario by a lot of people who were too young to fight their way through Galaxy 2's late-game stars. The inventiveness-per-level ratio has maybe only ever been matched by Odyssey itself.

And a freebie outside the Mario family entirely: Astro Bot. If you own a PS5 and Odyssey scratched an itch for you, Astro Bot scratches the same one, and it doesn't even try to hide where it learned its tricks. That's a compliment.

The full rundown is worth a read over at the original article. Have you actually finished Odyssey's darker side moon, by the way? If not, you've got no business on this list yet.