Last year, Nintendo's booth at the E3 expo in Los Angeles was a shrine to the one game it was showing off: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This year the Japanese gaming giant is showing multiple titles, but its huge booth has nonetheless been transformed to celebrate its biggest game of 2017: Super Mario Odyssey.

The theme of the game is that Mario is travelling across a fictional globe in a hat-shaped flying machine called the Odyssey, visiting several expansive and incredibly diverse areas including a jurassic mountain, a colourful food-themed volcano, a monochrome noir village and a realistic-looking urban area called New Donk City.

The city (which served as the inspiration for the design of Nintendo's booth) was one of the two areas I was able to explore during my brief time with the game. It's weird at first to see Mario rolling and triple-jumping his way through intersections and past yellow cabs and dapper 1940s gentlemen, but then all the game worlds we've seen from Odyssey so far are weird in one way or another.

In contrast to many recent Mario adventures, Odyssey is an open, 3D exploration game akin to Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Sunshine. There are no time limits and no clear objectives in the game's collection of exotic locales, just places to go, people to speak to and secrets to find.

Within a couple of minutes in New Donk City I'd scaled skyscrapers, jumped rope in a park, found hidden warp pipes, received some missions from Mayor Pauline — yes, the same Pauline who was once taken hostage by Donkey Kong —  and ridden a Vespa over some precarious scaffolding. In each case I was rewarded a Power Moon for my curiosity, capabilities or guile. These moons are spotted throughout each world — some you get by completing set quests and objectives, others just by discovering a secret — and the more you get the more worlds the Odyssey can visit.

Simply noodling around the world is a lot of fun thanks to the predictably excellent controls and Mario's deep inventory of acrobatic moves, but this time he has a new capability in his arsenal. By throwing his magical hat companion — called Cappy — Mario can not only smack enemies at a distance and cross long gaps, but he can also "capture" bad guys and objects to take control of them and use their special abilities.

This capability stands in for the power-ups of previous Mario games, and works perfectly in a world where you're constantly looking for new ways to get to unexplored areas and solve each world's puzzles. In the second area I explored — a Day of the Dead themed desert which had inexplicably frozen over — I took control of a bullet bill to zoom across a chasm. I also took control of a rocket to get to a secret area and a large Easter Island style statue with sunglasses, but I'm not sure what that's all about just yet.

The latest trailer for the game also shows Mario capturing a chain chomp, a frog, a goomba, fire, a dinosaur and much more.

Not all of Odyssey's fun ideas are tied to the capture mechanic though. Special pixelated pipes turn Mario into 8-bit graffiti on the wall to let him run a challenge in traditional 2D platforming style. Crazy Cap stores let you cash in coins for special outfits, which look fun but can also help when it comes to accessing certain areas. A lion statue in the desert stage serves as a rideable taxi to help you cross the dunes. 

Unlike previous exploration-based 3D Mario games — the last of which was 2010's Super Mario Galaxy 2 — you're not kicked back out to a hub world once you've solved a puzzle or completed an objective. Instead, once you've found a moon, you just keep on exploring. Checkpoints littered around the land give you place nearby to restart if you fail, and if you want to go somewhere else you simply jump back in the Odyssey.

Though much is still to be revealed, I've seen enough in my brief time with Odyssey — and in the footage streamed by Nintendo throughout the week — to know this is a very special game. The capture mechanic provides a huge amount of power-up variety while also letting the various cute enemies serve as more than just punching bags, while the costumes, currency systems and incentive to explore all seem really smart. 

Best of all you can just tell that the worlds are teeming with creative ideas, and I can't wait to find out what else is waiting to be discovered.

Super Mario Odyssey is out for the Nintendo Switch on October 27.

The author travelled to Los Angeles as a guest of Ubisoft.