Five Hidden Gems On The Switch

While the Nintendo Switch lineup is looking healthier than it did at launch, sometimes it’s still hard to figure out what else to play besides the big first party games. Here’s five games you may not have tried from the eShop.

Kamiko

This is an arcade-y action game with beautiful sprite art, where you play as one of three shrine maidens unlocking shrine gates and fighting monsters. Each character has a different weapon — a sword, a bow or a discus and knife — and it’s pretty fun to replay each level with each character.

Actually, they kind of give me Magic Knight Rayearth vibes. It’s not overly complex, but sometimes the puzzles are the good kind of brain teaser. How will you make it through this crowd of evil wasps without dropping this key? I don’t know, shrine maiden, that’s for you to figure out.

Lichtspeer

Lichtspeer is delightfully bizarre. In this game, you play as a warrior that’s been summoned by a bored god to slay monsters with a neon pink spear for their entertainment. You’ll go through increasingly more crowded stages slaying flying dogs and zombies. Lichtspeer is the kind of game that’s discovered how to do one thing really well (throwing spears), so it never gets boring to headshot a giant.

Gonner

This might be the first roguelike game that’s clicked for me, and I think it has at least a little bit to do with playing it on the Switch. This is a sidescrolling game that has you fighting and jumping through randomly generated stages, but what I really like is how good it feels to jump in this game. Ikk, the character you play as, has a weighty jump where they hang in the air for less than a second before falling.

There’s something particularly tactile about that when you’re playing in handheld mode, with the screen inches from your face. If you need more convincing, the art and music are both delightful as well. When you enter a room, you’re spat out of a giant worm, and when you exit it, you’re eaten by another one. Who wouldn’t love that?

The Bridge

Like spatial puzzles? Love M.C. Escher? Well, have I got a game for you. In this game you guide a character through a series of Escher-inspired mazes, using the shoulder buttons to rotate the map itself.

They’re sometimes challenging to complete, but not to the point of wanting to tear out your hair. I’m not always a puzzle person, but I like the aesthetic of this game, as well as how easy it is to rewind after accidentally crushing the player character to death beneath a boulder or flinging him off into the vacuum of space. Actually, the grim and Victorian mood of The Bridge brings to mind another artist — Edward Gorey.

Shephy

This game is bonkers. It’s a card game about breeding sheep and then also all the horrible things that can befall a sheep during its lifespan. Your goal is to fill your board with high value sheep cards without sacrificing too many sheep to a multitude of cards that represent natural disasters.

Plagues, wolves, disease, meteors — there’s a card in your deck that will have this method of death, and more. In the story mode, after each challenge you’ll also watch a morbid motion comic about the plight of these sheep as they look for their master. It’s completely absurd and I love every minute of it.