In the first three years of its life, the Nintendo Switch has proven to be quite the success, building up a library of great games and convincing folks that a console/handheld hybrid is something they need in their gaming lives. But 2020 will be the system’s biggest challenge yet as rivals Sony and Microsoft are both launching their next-gen consoles, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, at the end of this year. While you can’t take those consoles on the go, the difference in sheer power will be hard to ignore, even if the rumored Switch Pro ever does to fruition.
Still, hardware only exists as a portal to quality software, which the Switch definitely still has going into 2020. While you wait for the big hitters (Animal Crossing!) here are some nifty smaller Nintendo Switch games to play right now.
Afterparty
We already offered some initial impressions on Afterparty, the latest snarky narrative-driven adventure game from Night School. But in a twist of dark irony, this game about about dying, going to Hell, and trying to out party Satan wound up being the last new indie Nintendo Switch game we got to try out before the imminent closure of this very website. So pick your drink of choice, a wonderful mechanic for altering your drunk personality to your liking, and pour one out for Geek.com.
Samurai Shodown
Samurai Shodown is the same excellent fighting game revival we played last year, just a little blurrier but no less brutal on Nintendo Switch. The massive amount of damage a simple single sword strike can inflict means every action needs to be quickly yet carefully considered. The various weapon-specific systems (parrying, disarming, picking your sword back up) also add a unique feel compared to the Street Fighter clones of the world. You can command a dog. And the sheer comeback potential of the multiple super moves sends salt potential off the charts.
Vitamin Connection
Vitamin Connection is maybe the closest thing the Switch will get to Affordable Space Adventures, a niche indie Wii U game I hoped would one day be saved. Players control helpful vitamins curing various humans in a co-op cartoon take on Fantastic Voyage. Emphasis on co-op. While you can technically play alone, Vitamin Connection really wants you to coordinate with a friend, divvying up duties like firing the laser and angling the ship through tight corridors. I quite liked these shooter segments. They turn each human body into a little on-rails open map to explore. However, they’re broken up by minigames that are frequently more frustrating than fun. The sheer charm of WayForward’s art direction and music goes a long way toward getting you to let the medicine go down.
Metro Redux
Metro Redux (a collection containing Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light) is maybe the most Russian video game I’ve ever played that’s technically in English. Based on a series of novels you play as an armed citizen of an underground society trying to survive in the nuclear hellscape. That means not only dealing with monsters on the surface but also human politics below. The worldbuilding is fantastic, backed up by beautifully bleak visuals for rusty tunnels or snowy abandoned buildings. You realize why it takes so long to load on Switch. The encounters themselves, while more linear compared to the recent Metro: Exodus, at times recall the greatness of a Half-Life campaign. But the commitment to survival gameplay is something I appreciate more than I enjoy. Using bullets as currency, managing limited flashlight batteries, and swapping air mask filters feels totally appropriate for the setting. I just didn’t feel like actually suffering through it for very long.
Darksiders: Genesis
I was totally ready to dismiss Darksiders: Genesis as a cheap Diablo clone, another theft from a franchise that has no shame taking from the greats. But while Darksiders: Genesis does ask you to crawl through dungeons and score loot, it’s way closer to its traditional third-person action-adventure big brethren than an RPG. You still have elaborate combos systems, only now melee and projectile attacks are split across the two co-op characters. You still solve Zelda-esque environmental puzzles. And instead of feeling pared back, the levels are impressively huge. Almost too huge considering how aimless they can often feel. As for the story, while it’s nice to finally have a sense of all four horsemen, ten years later it still feels like the actual plot of this franchise is just constantly getting delayed.
Bloodroots
Bloodroots is another top-down, lightning-fast murder spree clearly descended from Hotline Miami. I like to call these “cocaine action” games. Instead of the glitzy grime of urban Florida, your carnage takes place across rustic, vaguely medieval fantasy/Weird West landscapes. Your weapons are more primitive, too. In fact, they usually break after just a few hits and the combat rhythm revolves around quickly finding a replacement. Fortunately, you have a lot of creative choices, not just axes and swords but wagon wheels and harpoon guns. Each weapon has its own unique finisher, too. This genre lends itself to uneven difficulty spikes, but Bloodroots gives players a fair amount of accessibility options to negate this. Using different weapons for different kinds of platforming also forces your brain to think about more than just killing.
Warface
I think Warface is an incredible actual name for a video game. Unfortunately, that’s the most interesting thing this free-to-play military shooter has going for it. Sure it’s impressive to see the famously taxing CryEngine running pretty well on a tablet. But here it’s used to deliver generic shooting action multiplayer we’ve already seen for years. Even the guns, which do feel pretty great, are tainted by the vague pay-to-win elements for the best equipment. That said, I at least felt like there was a lot I could experience before having to pay.
Two Point Hospital
Two Point Hospital is the spiritual successor to (and comes from the creators of) a little old PC management sim called Theme Hospital. But even if you’ve never played that, or have no idea what it is, just imagine Roller Coaster Tycoon but for hospitals and you’re set. And that premise is more fun than it sounds. Part of it comes from a nice sense of humor, taking the piss out of the potential life and death stakes. “Diseases” make patients spew verbal diarrhea or delude themselves into becoming mock rock stars. Sure they might die and haunt you, but you can just hire a janitor with ghost-busting tech. The easygoing atmosphere makes it easy to sink into the surprisingly intuitive management systems and interface for a console game. Hiring staff, arranging rooms, and staying profitable is shockingly easy. It helps that your hospital can only get so big, meaning things never get as unwieldy or overwhelming as a full-blown city-planning game. And the campaign breaks up the tech tree into discreet goals to accomplish in very reasonably sized chunks. It doesn’t make me sick!
Kunai
There’s just nothing like a good gaming grappling hook, and Kunai’s centerpiece is a pair of great gaming grappling hooks. Metroidvania’s live or die based on how fun they make the otherwise intolerable act of backtracking. And swinging through the skies like a 2D pixelated Spider-Man, gracefully transitioning to sword and shuriken combat, makes Kunai just one of the best feeling 2D sidescrollers I’ve played in a while. And the level design mostly presents you with clever challenges to overcome with that moveset. The art style might be too minimal for its own good though, perhaps because most of the attention went to the mechanics. The post-apocalyptic world of living computers is a cute conceit but could use just a little more personality.
Kentucky Route Zero
After nearly a decade in development, the episodic interactive exploration of America’s decline reaches an appropriately magical realist end. We already told you why we feel Kentucky Route Zero is the perfect game for the 20th century. Just know that, even with a very mood art style and sound design, this is largely a game about following plot through text and offering your own take on that text. It’s definitely something to be admired, but maybe not something all will enjoy.
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics
I feel like this game is pitching itself to Dark Crystal fans who may not play strategy games, but I’m a strategy game fan who has yet to watch a single minute of Dark Crystal. Still, even though I don’t know the specifics of this Jim Henson puppets, the overall fantasy vibe works fine. Not being a fan of the franchise also probably makes the shortcomings of the game more clear. You gather a fairly large cast of characters but can only bring a fraction of them into battle. So you really have to pay attention to who you level up. And the flexibility of the job system gives you plenty of options to explore within characters. But even when I did have to think about, say environmental tactics, I mostly slept walk through battles in this generic and weirdly sluggish version of a game I’ve played many better versions of in the past.
Knights and Bikes
After playing through Knights and Bikes, my opinions ultimately didn’t change that much from when I first checked out the game at GDC two years ago. The veteran Media Molecule talent pull off a fantastic tactile art style for representing 1980s British childhood. It’s cool that this is a game about kids that also seems like it’s appropriate for kids. But as a result the actual gameplay feels so thin as to be almost nonexistent, biking to different areas and occasionally smashing stuff while waiting to trigger the next story beat. It’s so adorable that I actively feel bad ultimately being so bored, but it is what it is.
Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales
Thronebreaker feels like what would happen when CD Projekt Red puts their considerable writing talent and love of epic scope to what might as well be a mobile game spin-off. It takes the Gwent card game from The Witcher and expands it into the combat system powering a lengthy illustrated RPG campaign. The tale of the exiled Queen Meve, complete with voice acting, feels as compelling as any Witcher sidequest. And you can even skip battles to keep the plot moving. I ended up doing that a lot because even without the rest of The Witcher III to distract me I still don’t like Gwent. Slay The Spire taught me I’m not immune to the addictive joys of amassing a powerful deck. It’s just that even successful strategies in Gwent feel indirect and unsatisfying. If you like Gwent though, this is by far the best way to shoot it directly into your veins.
Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore
As much as I’ve championed Wii U games coming to Switch, just so that more people have a chance to actually play them, these ports have offered little to me personally as a fan of that doomed system. However, Tokyo Mirage Sessions is one of the few Wii U games I originally skipped. Probably because the intensely anime flavor of the Fire Emblem/Shin Megami Tensei crossover seemed too much to bear.
But you know what, for a game literally about Japanese pop stars fighting demons in Shibuya through the power of performance, this game is more stylish than annoying. Like a catchy song, the battle system is simple yet quick and addictive, encouraging you to chain together complementary attacks for combos that can wipe out all foes in one move. Powering through the main storyline is similarly streamlined compared to a typical bloated JRPG. You can tackle a dungeon in a single session or two and there are only a handful of them. The limited amount of Fire Emblem content does feel like a Kingdom Hearts-esque grift, but there’s a similar strategy in deploying your different party members and their different weapons. At least the new Joker costume can make this feel like Persona 5 on Switch.
Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD
For whatever reason, the original Oddworld: Strangers Wrath was the game that almost got me to buy an original Xbox. Just something about this grizzled sasquatch cowboy and his critter ammunition really spoke to me as a kid. Playing the game now, it’s definitely a game from 2005. But it’s a good game from that era! Even if there’s not that much difference between shooting bees and skunks versus shooting bullets and smoke bombs, wouldn’t you rather shoot bees? The different strengths of each weapon make bounty hunting feel like actual hunting. And the themes of nature versus industry Oddworld has always embraced feel especially appropriate in a Western setting.
Super Crush K.O.
The team behind the excellent early Switch game Graceful Explosion Machine takes that same immaculate approach to arcade action and applies it to the beat ‘em up genre. Switching between your various attacks, from high-flying uppercuts to twisting ground kicks, feels like playing Bayonetta or Devil May Cry but in 2D. You even have a gun for extending combos, something I’ve never gotten a handle on in action games until now. Don’t let the soft pastel colors fool you. Besting the enemy hordes is a tall order. And yet the fluid, juggling nature of the combat, which really asks you to consider the whole playfield, makes perfect runs feel tantalizingly possible.
Stories Untold
Stories Untold is an anthology of short story-based horror games revolving around manipulating spooky old tech. And like most anthologies some are better than others. The standout for me is the first game, which is really just a text adventure with added production value. Like expensive podcasts, it makes an ancient storytelling form feel fresh again. Unfortunately, as the analog interfaces get more complex, I found myself more removed from the subtle terror and just annoyed at the fiddling knobs.
It came from space and ate our brains!
How about that title? This is a pretty straightforward top-down shooter. But I appreciated little touches like surprisingly moody lighting for the otherwise simple voxel look or how much it commits to the vague survival horror elements. Playing alone, you’re quickly overwhelmed and upgrades like gun mods or land mines are a must. Levels do tend to drag, however, perhaps because they’re more tuned to co-op play.
Skellboy
Skellboy sounds like what I would call Sans when trying to annoy Undertale fans. But he’s actually the star of this little action-RPG. As a skeleton, you can swap various parts of your body with limbs harvested from foes. This leads to some Kirby-esque on-the-fly power-swapping as well as some light puzzle-solving as you change your look to reach new areas. It’s all a very cool idea, as is the game’s indie Octopath Travler art style which projects chunky sprites onto the 3D world and its cleverly connected zones. But for whatever reason, maybe technical performance, the act of actually playing Skellboy just never felt as smooth as I would’ve hoped. Thankfully, a day-one patch has addressed this.
Speedrunners
More arcade racing games where you are running on foot please. Speedrunners doesn’t have the nifty color-swapping gimmick of Runbow, but it has similar local competitive thrills and vaguely the same visual style. Between the complexity of the looping sidescrolling maps and your variety of tools, it feels like there’s never just one sure way to make it through a stretch the fastest. Swing across the ceiling with your grapple hook? Slide under boxes? Unleash a power-up? Wall jumps? And the way the field of view shrinks to take out stragglers is a great, almost battle royale way of forcing matches to a conclusion.
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