Nintendo is keeping Donkey Kong’s age in upcoming Switch 2 platformer Bananza under wraps for now, because this bit of mystery is “good fodder for player theories”.

While Nintendo previously confirmed DK’s sidekick Pauline is 13 in Donkey Kong Bananza, the team won’t commit to sharing anything about the main monkey’s age. Speaking with IGN, director Kazuya Takahashi and producer Kenta Motokura (who was the director of Super Mario Odyssey) said they instead want fans to speculate and theorise about DK’s age in the game.

Meanwhile, when asked why Nintendo had chosen to share the exact age Pauline is in the game, the duo again played their cards close to their chest. “I think that’s something that we want players to, in the course of enjoying the game, start to puzzle out, think for themselves,” the developers teased, suggesting her age may actually play a part in Bananza’s overall story.

Takahashi added that the Donkey Kong Bananza team wanted Pauline’s character to act “in some cases as a bit of a narrator” on the game’s release. “And considering we would probably have both new players who are experiencing a Donkey Kong game for the first time, as well as people who are long-time fans of Donkey Kong, we had the opportunity to offer a character that was familiar to long-time players, but had a new appearance that might be interesting for new folks as well,” the director elaborated.

Motokura added the team is “always thinking about the setting of not just the world but also each character itself and how that’s going to impact player enjoyment in the end”.

Later in the same conversation, discussion turned to where Donkey Kong Bananza sits in any established timeline. After all, Pauline does crop up as mayor of New Donk City in Super Mario Odyssey, and given the same development team is behind both Bananza and Odyssey, does this mean DK’s next outing is actually a prequel? Again, Nintendo is for now keeping things cryptic.

“Certainly because a lot of team members also worked on Super Mario Odyssey, there are some similarities in terms of how they think about the setting of the characters for both games,” Takahashi said, “but it’s something we really can’t explain all of for now because we need to leave something for people to consider as they’re playing the game.”

Hmm…

Donkey Kong Bananza is set to release later this month, on 17th July. Our Alex has been hands-on with the upcoming Donkey Kong game, saying his time with the Switch 2 title simply “flew by”.

“Even if I spent much of it doing a lot of the same wrecking ball actions repeatedly,” Alex wrote in Eurogamer’s Donkey Kong Bananza preview, “time flying is always a sure-fire sign of something that’s good – so this formula might just be a winner.”