Defying Nintendo and all things good, Super Mario Bros. Wonder modder reveals what 'long' characters actually look like, and I can't decide who's worst
Save yourself - do not scroll any further if you value your ability to sleep at night
Since the first trailer for Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the world has been contemplating a single, horrible question: what does elongated Mario really look like? Well, folks, we now have an answer, and it's every bit as horrifying as you might've imagined.
There's a level in Super Mario Bros. Wonder called Sproings in the Twilight Forest where everything appears as a dark silhouette against a colorful background. Picking up the Wonder Flower in this level will turn your character - and many of the stage's enemies - into an elongated version with an uber-long torso. A brief glimpse of this stage appeared in the game's very first trailer, and ever since then I've been wondering - nay, forced to wonder - what that long Mario would look like in normal lighting.
Well, none of us have to wonder anymore. A player by the name of RedStoneMatt has modified the game to remove the silhouette effect and reveal elongated Mario in all his glory. It didn't take long for other players to use the mod to reveal elongated Luigi, Peach, Toadette, Toad, Yoshi, and Nabbit, too, and I've been mesmerized by this tweet from Supper Mario Broth as I try to figure out which of them is the most horrifying.
Yeah, sure, there's a certain horror in Mario and Luigi just looking like human tree trunks, but there's something about Nabbit's inhuman proportions that's deeply upsetting. Peach gets the benefit of a super-long skirt to hide whatever's going on with her, and Yoshi honestly just looks like he's having a good time.
It's really Toad and Toadette that I'll never be able to get out of my mind. They both look like Eldritch horrors, breaking the bounds of Euclidean geometry with their terrible angles. Good luck sleeping tonight, folks.
Who needs the best horror games when you can just look at a Super Mario Bros. Wonder mod?
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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.