
Initially, when finding a balloon there's an arrow showing you the direction along with the distance away.

But as coins are all over the place, and one can take many different routes, there can be quite a bit of permutations. Conversely, when finding a balloon, additional coins buy you extra time to search. When you are hiding a balloon extra coins give you more time, but also adding a challenge as the player finding the balloon will need to find coins as well.

There are 30 seconds to find or hide a balloon, however the timer can be increased by obtaining coins which adds to the challenge - every 3 coins adds one second to the timer. In addition there's a star ranking as you proceed through this mini-game. You will earn coins when someone tries to find your hidden balloons. Each time you play it will cost at least 10 coins depending on the selected balloon, and you win coins if you successful find a balloon.

It's self explanatory, you either go out to find a balloon, or hide one. Within the new mini-game there are two modes: Find it and Hide it. I went right over to Metro Kingdom first as that's what the initial screenshots showed, but that was unnecessary. Luigi is in most of the kingdoms in a fairly prominent area, simply talk to him and you can start the mini-game. Once I started SMO again, I was notified that a new mode is available. It appears the download had been automatically downloaded to my Switch, I just had to close my current game and restart, so this is a fairly smooth experience that I've also seen with other games. I finally got a chance to try it out last weekend.

It'll be interesting to see if they'll extend this concept further for Super Mario Odyssey, but time will tell. And perhaps this opens the door to new DLC levels or kingdoms. When the Luigi's Balloon World update for Super Mario Odyssey was pushed out by Nintendo just after midnight last Thursday in a surprise announcement, I was pretty excited, but unfortunately I had to go to work the next morning so I haven't been able to play it yet.Ī free DLC update is a great sign from Nintendo, they are indeed catching up with the times by providing a new feature to a game.
