If you’re anything like me, your gaming time is short and your budget hovers between being sad, and so sad it’s almost funny. But, The Switch eshop presents a vast, untamed wilderness of low-cost/ low-commitment titles for the exhausted and impoverished. I have braved this wilderness and returned to let you know what games are worth your hard-earned pennies.
No Thing
Can video games be art? How can they not be when we have games like Journey, Shadow of the Colossus, and Limbo? Now, No Thing joins these esteemed ranks by embodying the pure, purposeful confusion that can only stem from post-modern absurdism. In No Thing, the player will enter the first-person perspective of an unseen avatar as they navigate a world of floating structures under the eyes of disembodied heads as 90s-era MIDI tracks loop in the background. Your character cannot stop; there is only turning left or right as you heedlessly careen forward, spurred on by the non-sequitur comments of a synthesized voice, but failure to execute a turn correctly results in immediate death. Over and over again, you push forward. You lose count of how many times you retry. You memorize the turns and the patterns. It doesn’t matter. You hear those synth lines so many times; they go from nonsense, to profound, to nonsense again. And what is art for if not to blow the collective minds of the audience?
Watermelon Party
If Watermelon Party looks like a cheap, barebones asset flip, it’s only because it feels like a cheap, barebones asset flip. Luckily, it’s probably the best cheap, barebones asset flip you’re going to find.
I was at a party and the host was looking for a cheap multiplayer distraction, and we took a low-stakes gamble on this 59-cent title.
The premise is simple: guide your asset-flip avatar to watermelon slices by laying randomly selected pieces of tiles to form a path. Be the first to arrange a path to collect every piece of watermelon and win. If you’re looking for a chill way to wind down a party or just to kill about 15 minutes, you can’t do any better for 59 cents.
Inbento
I’ll rarely buy any game at full price, but at just $5, I couldn’t say, “no,” to Inbento. Now, I can’t stop recommending it to friends. The premise is simple: help this adorable cat-mom make lunches for her cat-kids by arranging the food tiles into various patterns. The more you progress, the more illustrations you unlock of these small, sweet moments in the lives of this family.
It’s perfect for unwinding after a rough day, has a smooth difficulty curve, and the slow pace makes it great for having something to watch in the background. Inbento deserves to be on EVERY Switch
Cat Girl Without Salad: Amuse-Bouche
When the trailer for Cat Girl Without Salad: Amuse-Bouche dropped on April 1st, I was psyched that the team at WayForward had put so much work into a trailer for a game too ridiculous to actually be released. A cell-shaded space shoot ‘em up starring an aggressively kawaii cat-girl where the specialty weapons were all references to totally different genres of classic games that played like their source material. But, at the end of said trailer was a Switch Logo and the announcement that it was for sale on the eshop. I couldn’t grab my Switch and get this downloaded fast enough.
Unfortunately, CGWS: AB has to be the fastest I’ve ever gone from hype, to crippling disillusionment. The dialogue is purposefully meant to bring the audience right up to the point of cringe without going over. While the script mostly succeeds (owing almost entirely to the strength of the voice cast with Cristina Valenzuela, in particular, standing out as the titular cat girl) even the jokes that land at became grating when repeating a level. I’d hoped that the genre-combine weapons would be enough to carry the game despite any misgivings with the story, but even that was a letdown. As cool as the weapons are in theory, you lose them if you take a single hit. And given that this is an intense space shooter, and your attention is split between controlling the cat girl and her weapons independently, you’re going to get hit a lot.
I dreaded losing boss fights because I couldn’t stand the thought of sitting through the same, unskippable dialogue and drawn-out levels another time. I found myself avoiding the Switch entirely because I didn’t want to play, but also didn’t want to close the game, erase the checkpoint, and start the level over.
I eventually managed to struggle through all three levels and was relieved to just be able to put the game down. That is until I got a pop-up that showed I had unlocked the ability to just have all the weapons at from the start and never lose them.
I played through again.
It was a blast being able to learn the nuances of each tool instead of losing it right away. The longer level structure gave me plenty of time to play around with different weapon combinations.
Too bad none of the story or dialogue had changed, so I had to sit through the same stale jokes. Again. If this mode was available from the start, I’d say this game was just about perfect. Every part of CGWS: AB feels entire self-defeating, and it’s just not worth the first playthrough to get to the second.
