As I get older, the more I’ve begun to idolize Kirby. For a teenager, a pink puff ball who primarily attacks by devouring things might not sound impressive, but as an adult, the ability to eat virtually anything you want and suffer no adverse health effects or gain permanent weight is a superpower I would kill for. Alas, a metabolism rate of infinity is restricted to fictional spherical rose-hued spheroids.

The distinction this time around is that Kirby’s constant consumption is now a competition rather than a single player quest to reach the end of a series of levels. Four player or computer controller Kirbies roll over a variety of courses while attempting to eat as many strawberries as possible. There’s a ticking clock element throughout as well, as the first, second, and third Kirbies to reach the end get a bonus of 50, 20, and 10 strawberries respectively, requiring players to balance moving quickly and grabbing food on the way. I do think the end bonuses should probably be a little smaller; 50 strawberries is a lot to try and outweigh by rolling more carefully, but it’s a solid concept at least.

Moving through the game’s variety of courses is accomplished by rolling in a fashion that reminded me a bit of Kirby and the Rainbow Curse. Kirby handles pretty well, with the ability to... well, roll and jump to navigate certain obstacles. Courses are designed with plenty of bottomless pits, with falling off requiring you to hover back to the stage or lose some of your fruit.

Course design is honestly a lot more engaging than I was anticipating for a $15 game. There are lots of hidden pathways that require power-ups to move through and splits with a safe, but longer route & a risky, but quicker route. It all leads to some fun on-the-fly decision-making that keeps matches interesting.

The standard mode in Kirby’s Dream Buffet is Grand Prix, which involves two races on different courses, a food collecting minigame, and then a battle minigame where you try to knock other players off the map. It’s a good set-up, with a decent amount of variety packed into one go. The final battle minigame at the end is always especially chaotic, with Kirbies that have eaten more food increasing in size, granting them more pushing power but also making them a greater target. Each of these portions can be played individually as well, so if you want to just do a course race without the minigames, for example, you can.

There's also an impressive amount of unlocakbles to boot, ranging from additional costumes, to music, to little models you can just stare at. It adds a lot of replayability and incentive to keep going that I'm surprised to see in what otherwise appears to be a relatively low key game; honestly I think quite a few of Nintendo's bigger franchises could take a lesson from Dream Buffet when it comes to adding fun little collectables to discover.

All of this would make Kirby’s Dream Buffet a solid addition to anyone’s collection of party games, which is why its biggest flaw is such a head scratcher. Local splitscreen is limited to two players, which severely limits its potential as a party option. This likely has a lot to do with technical limitations; even with only two players, I often ran into stutters and framedrops. I'm not certain why it would have difficultly, especially when other 2 player splitscreen titles on Switch have generally run well. Whatever the cause, though, it means it's a lot harder to set Dream Buffet up as a party game, when that should be its greatest strength.

On top of that, Nintendo’s continued inability to design a particularly functional online system makes playing Dream Buffet at all a bit of a hassle. There’s a significant amount of inherent input delay in online games (it feels like 10 or so frames to me), and less-than-perfect connections usually add much more, making precise rolling virtually impossible. Even if you enjoy the core gameplay enough to play it without friends, you’ll need to navigate through a good deal of delay and lag to play it at all online.

This leaves the Dream Buffet’s LAN mode as the best way to play, and while this does bring back the more social setting and deals with a lot of the online problems, it’s probably not realistic for many people. On top of requiring multiple Switches, you’ll need multiple copies of the game (there’s no option for one person to own and temporarily “share” it with others). And even then, the same two player splitscreen framerate issues remain, which means that for a consistently enjoyable experience, you may need 3-4 Switches with every single one having bought the game.

Ultimately, Kirby’s Dream Buffet consists of a lot of good ideas unfortunately hampered by Nintendo’s continued online bugaboo and what I suspect are technical limitations. If you happen to have a group of friends who all own a Switch and are willing to drop the cash on this title, it can make a solid addition to a party line-up. Barring that, however, Dream Buffet just has too many hoops you need to jump through to play it properly, so it's difficult to recommend, even at the relatively cheap price of $15. And that’s a real shame, because the content is fun, it’s just too difficult to get to that fun.