It was a quiet Saturday morning. Despite my plans to sleep in late, I woke up at 9 a.m. and decided to get up and take a morning shower. I rolled out of bed as gently as I could so as not to wake up my girlfriend. She looked so peaceful, so I took care to tiptoe out of our bedroom and let her rest. When I snuck back into the bedroom 30 minutes later, she was awake and perturbed.

“It woke me up by saying ‘They say the ocean tastes like tears,’” she said, motioning towards the orange menace on our nightstand.

This is what the future holds for you if you let the dreaded Talking Flower into your home. Nintendo’s new creation takes Super Mario Bros. Wonder’s cheery character and turns it into a wise-cracking toy that quips at you throughout the day. It’s a lifestyle product in the same vein as the Alarmo alarm clock, meant to add a little more color and — dare I say — wonder to kids’ everyday lives outside their Switch screens. That’s a well-meaning idea… in theory. But in practice, the Talking Flower is a jump scare machine built to terrorize your peace. You must approach it as you would an enemy.

My domestic battle with the plastic pest began one week ago. I returned home from a long week of work at the Game Developers Conference to find that a small package had arrived while I was gone. I knew it was the Talking Flower. My girlfriend did not — because I opted not to tell her that I would be introducing it into our household ahead of time. We’ve been dating long enough that she’s used to me bringing products like the Alarmo into our apartment, but the key to a good relationship is preserving some mystery. I only gave her a hint that something was coming two months earlier, noting that “something is going to happen to our house in a few months.” She has been terrified ever since.

I let her handle unboxing duties to finally pay off that threat/promise. As soon as she pulled the Talking Flower out, her jaw dropped about as far as Ghostface’s. I don’t know how to describe her expression. It was somewhere at the intersection of disbelief, ironic joy, and legitimate terror. She wordlessly turned the packaging over in her hands like Brad Pitt in Seven. After a few moments, she finally composed herself enough to read the features printed on the side. One caught her eye immediately.

“Talking Flower will also announce the hour… but is it always accurate?” she read. “What does that mean!?”

That’s a great question that I still don’t have an answer to. But what I can tell........

© Polygon