The final Tilt-and-Roll Kirby board will be my undoing

This motion-based Kirby and the Forgotten Land mini-game is harder than it looks

One of the hardest bits of Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a simple little motion-controlled puzzle board. No joke: I’m struggling more with the Tilt-and-Roll Kirby mini-game than I ever did in the Ultimate Cup Z, a boss-rush arena with harder variants of the big baddies.

All I have to do is avoid pitfalls and tap the Kirby ball into the hole by tilting my Nintendo Switch ~just so~, but my nerves refuse to chill out. I’m wasting a bunch of time and coins trying to completely finish this content — the final “Extra Hard” variant has other ideas.

To back up a bit, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, like many Kirby games before it, has some cute side activities to bolster the main adventure. This one — Tilt-and-Roll Kirby — starts out that way at least. If you’re playing along right now and haven’t come across any of this yet, you’ll need to save 180 Waddle Dees before this mini-game tent comes to town.

There are three motion-controlled puzzle boards to complete, and the first two aren’t bad at all. The third one, though… I spent dozens of attempts and I’m still not sure how to reliably pull off the last zig-zagging stretch. Thankfully, you only need to get through the (much more forgiving) Normal versions of these boards to score a Game-Shop Waddle Dee figure for your capsule collection, so the Extra Hard variants are for bragging rights.

I’m having such a blast savoring every morsel of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, so I can’t stop now. I just need to get through this EX course once. That’s what I keep telling myself.

Are you too good for your home?

I’ve tried playing with perfect posture, slouching a bit, slouching a lot, laying down on my back, laying on my stomach, the works. I always over-correct in the final few seconds.

You get 999 Star Coins and a checkmark for beating the Extra Hard third board in under 30 seconds. Does it “matter?” No! Will I ever look at it again? Absolutely not. But I need that validation. I won’t let the sunk-cost fallacy deter my meaningless gaming obsessions.

Here’s footage of an Extra Hard clear captured by YouTube user MewtwoStruckBack, just in case. Sometimes, watching another person beat a challenge is literally all that’s needed to stroll into another attempt and knock it out of the park. I wasn’t so fortunate this time.

I don’t have any particular advice for this third round — I’m not aware of any Breath of the Wild-style maze-subverting strategies — but I thought it’d be fun to share our pain.

Maybe I’d have an easier time if I had grown up playing Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble on Game Boy Color. As neat as it seemed at the time, that translucent pink cartridge was too much of a risky prospect with a super limited gamer kid budget. I’m not cut out for these gimmicks!