There’s plenty to get stuck into on Switch this week, with many-a-publisher pushing out physical releases – around ten games head to both retail and the eShop.
Look out for Kamiwaza: Way of the Thief – a remaster of a PS2 stealth adventure, which has stood the test of time remarkably well – the online asymmetrical action game Dragon Ball: The Breakers, and Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3 – with 40 characters and 12 players online support. Then there’s Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova – screenshots of which fail to inspire much confidence – psychological horror In Sound Mind, and the sports compendium Winter Games 2023.
Thunderful’s diorama-based puzzle adventure LEGO Bricktales has received the review treatment, with scores being slightly mixed. TSA awarded it an 8/10 but warned of performance issues.
Nintendo Life was a lot more damning, opting for a 6/10. “It’s the kind of game that you just take at your own pace and lose yourself for a bit to the relaxing tunes and simple act of building. It’s a shame, then, that awkward controls hamper your creativity and hold it back from greatness,” they said.
Reviews of Atari Mania – essentially an Atari-flavoured Wario Ware – are also live now and suggest that it’s worth a look. “Atari Mania is an absolute blast. The world includes a number of puzzles that adds variety to the speedy microgames formula. While the company lacks the same number of mainstream icons as Nintendo, the implementation of popular IPs is masterful,” was COGconnected’s verdict. It’s nice to see Bentley Bear making a comeback.
We’ll have a review of Trifox live tomorrow – it’s a top-down action platformer with three-character classes to play as: mage, warrior, and engineer. Just to set the comical tone, the plot sees our foxy lead out to retrieve their stolen TV remote.
Other intriguing indies out this week include the ‘80s set pixel art adventure Unusual Findings, aquarium management sim Aquarist, and the turn-based civilization strategy game The Battle of Polytopia. There’s also a retro re-release of the 16-bit platformer Tinhead, the Donkey Kong Country-style rendered vertical platformer Beeny, and the tug-of-war style strategy game Warpips. Tally ho!
New Switch eShop releases
DRAGON BALL: THE BREAKERS – £17.99
DRAGON BALL: THE BREAKERS is an online asymmetrical action game in which a team of 7 ordinary citizens tries to survive the Raider (a classic DRAGON BALL rival such as Cell, Frieza, and Buu), who will hunt them down and evolve during the game into an unstoppable force. Escaping won’t be so easy!
Kamiwaza: Way of the Thief – £35.99
Join honorable thief Ebizo on the streets of Mikado, and put your thieving skills to the test! Will you walk the path of honor for the sake of family? The choice is yours to make.
Nickelodeon Kart Racers 3: Slime Speedway – £39.99
Rebuilt and re-imagined from the ground up, Nickelodeon Kart Racers returns – bigger and better than ever! Featuring a cast of over 40 iconic characters, drift, slide and boost your way to the finish line on tracks inspired by legendary Nickelodeon shows like SpongeBob SquarePants, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Avatar: The Last Airbender and more!
Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova – £44.99
After the Protostar picks up strange readings from a dying star, Dal R’El and Gwyndala race against time to save their friends, their ship, new alien species and an entire planetary system before a supernova destroys them all!
When the Protostar’s malfunctioning transporter scatters the crew across three alien planets, Dal and Gwyn must use their wits and skills to overcome ingenious puzzles, endure hostile environments and battle deadly robot armies to rescue Jankom Pog, Rok-Tahk, Zero and Murf. But as they search for their friends, they soon discover a sinister and deadly new enemy, one that will stop at nothing to destroy the Protostar and change the very course of history!
As you awake in the corridors of an inexplicable building, you find the environment takes on a life of its own and leads you to discover a series of victims, all exposed to the same experimental chemical. In your search for answers, bizarre visions emerge and introduce a host of imposing horrors…and a cat named Tonia.
From the creators of the cult classic Nightmare House 2 comes In Sound Mind, a witty first-person psychological horror with frenetic puzzles and unique boss fights. Traverse a series of unsettling memories as you journey within the inner workings of the one place you can’t seem to escape—your own mind.
NASCAR Rivals, the officially licensed video game of the 2022 season, puts the fun and intensity of the NASCAR Cup Series in the palm of your hands on the Nintendo Switch™. Featuring the 2022 official teams, drivers, cars, and regular season and playoff schedule from the world’s most popular stock car racing series.
Create your own legacy with Career Mode, compete as your favorite driver at any track in Race Now, beat your rivals in online, local and split-screen multiplayer, try your best to beat real-life challenges and customize your own driver and paint scheme.
Start your rivalry on the track or wherever you go with NASCAR Rivals!
You play as the Caretaker of the Atari Vault, the storehouse of classic Atari games. One night, a dead pixel appears and soon enough, all heck breaks loose!!
Familiar and beloved games begin to warp, mutate and combine into a series of increasingly crazy challenges. It’s up to you to fight back the pixels and other surprising villains, and restore order to the Vault!
Put your thumbs to the test in a journey through 64 awesome handcrafted levels. Max out your skills and improve your times to be the very best!
If you love action-based puzzle games, this could be right up your alley!
A vertical 2D platformer featuring a round bee in an early 90s prerendered environment. Roll and hop up to the precious honey!
Play as Anna, finding a job and moving to a new country. Explore her new life, struggles, loneliness, relationships, language barrier.
Pill Baby features deep action mechanics, including a wide movement set where you can learn lots of different attacks, and use them strategically. Helpful drone units with special moves that help you on offense or defense. Custom gloves for special effects such as freezing or poisoning parasites. Use all your powers strategically to fight with epic parasites 10 times your size.
Play as Anna, finding a job and moving to a new country. Stress, loneliness and alienation. Can she survive here? See the small town she moved to and interact with her new friends and neighbors. Form all kinds of relationships. Sinister and mysterious things are going on in this town.
Billiard: Classic 8 Ball Pool – £8.99
In our billiards you can play both with a virtual opponent and with friends on one device! Challenge a friend to a duel and compete with him in skill, dexterity and accuracy, because only these skills will help you achieve victory!
The rules of the game are simple – pocket all the balls of the same colour into the holes and end the match with the final black ball to defeat your opponent. But if the rules are simple, then the process itself will make you sweat, because in order to score all the balls faster than your opponent, you will have to show miracles of dexterity and accuracy. A correctly calculated trajectory will help you to quickly pocket your balls, and if you’re lucky, even several balls in one shot!
If there were no friends nearby, then you can play with a virtual opponent by selecting the desired difficulty. If you are a beginner, choose an easy one and train to improve your skill. And if you are a pro, then challenge the virtual opponent on a high level of difficulty and prove that you are a billiards master!
You wake up in a peaceful wetland only to realize that the stars that used to fill the night sky have now fallen down.
Wander through a picturesque yet mysterious landscape, catching critters with your bug net and meeting colourful characters…
Along the way, pick wild flowers, eat mushrooms, find messages left inside bottles and much more!
Will the missing constellations return to the night sky?
Tinhead (QUByte Classics) – £4.49
Tinhead is an action/adventure platformer which put the player in control of Tinhead as he embarks in a journey to save the stars from the evil Grim Squidge.
Leap, slide, hop, fly and shoot your way through wacky worlds and super-tricky challenging levels as you guide Tinhead to free the stars. Take on pesky spinning Krystals, relentless flying Saw-Sirs and hordes of mega-tough bosses.
Who will save the stars before it’s too late? Tinhead, Defender of the Edge of the Galaxy, of course!
Rush Hour Deluxe – The ultimate traffic jam game! – £17.99
Can you skilfully manoeuvre the red car out of the traffic jam? Slide the vehicles blocking it in their lanes forwards and backwards – until the road ahead is clear for the red car!
Not only can you play Rush Hour® Deluxe alone, but go head-to-head with other players to measure your brainpower: who will solve the challenges in the quickest time and with the fewest moves?
In LEGO® Bricktales, discover an innovative brick-by-brick building mechanic to design puzzle solutions from your own imagination. See your creations brought to life in a beautiful LEGO world where every problem has a constructive resolution.
Embark on an epic adventure across a world of beautiful LEGO diorama biomes crafted brick by brick as you search for inspiration to help your grandfather reinvigorate his rundown amusement park with your little robot buddy in tow. Your journey will take you to the deepest jungle, sun-drenched deserts, a bustling city corner, a towering medieval castle, and tropical Caribbean islands. Help the minifigures of these worlds by solving puzzles and unlock new skills throughout the story to further explore these worlds and uncover the many secrets and mysteries they contain.
From purely aesthetic creations, such as a market stand or music box, up to functional physics-based puzzles like building a crane or gyrocopter – each diorama offers a variety of construction spots with the freedom of intuitive brick-by-brick building. In each spot you are given a set of bricks and it’s up to you to figure out a unique build that will work. On top of specific puzzles and quests, there are additional builds in the amusement park so you can customize the rides to make them your own!
It’s the 80s and the Christmas is coming, Vinny, Nick and Tony are young and their new cable signal descrambler just arrived. That same night while trying to decrypt a pay per view adult channel, they pick up the distress signal of an alien spaceship crash-landing in the woods near their town… Things only get weirder as they realize that the towering alien is killing very specific members of their community!
Explore the world oozing with nostalgia, check the Video Buster Store for clues, challenge other kids at the Laser Llamas Arcades, go learn a new trick at The Emerald Sword comic store, try to get along with the punk looking Lost Guys at their hideout or even dare to ask THE BULL, the quintessential 80s Action hero, for some help!
Follow the story that pays tribute to 80s classics like The Goonies, The Explorers, Monster Squad, The Lost Boys, They Live, Terminator, and Aliens among others and a gameplay that combines mechanics of Point and Click masterpieces like Full Throttle with its own unique twist and more.
Your decisions do matter, and the way you make these three friends interact with each other increasingly affects their friendship and the whole story, changing the way they solve the game puzzles, the locations they visit, the answers they find, the story, everything.
Uncover the truth hidden behind the alien invasion… well sort of. Why here? Why is it killing locals? How can the boys stop it? Will they tune in the adult channel after all? The answers to these and other questions… in Unusual Findings.
Warpips is what would happen if a classic strategy game and a tug-of-war game had a baby made out of tanks and napalm! Set loose the engine of war and watch the chaos of physics-based combat explode onto the battlefield! Assemble your army from a diverse roster of infantry, vehicles and airplanes. Deploy troops, call down airstrikes, and launch missiles – all without that pesky micromanagement.
BLOODWASH is a giallo-inspired laundry horror game with low-poly graphics.
Sara is a pregnant college student living with her alcoholic boyfriend in a run-down apartment complex. To make matters worse, a serial killer targeting pregnant women, the Womb Ripper, is terrorizing the city. One night, the washing machine in the basement breaks down. A helpful neighbor tells Sara about a 24-hour laundromat on the outskirts of town. What she finds there might claim her life!
Space Roguelike Adventure – £4.49
Now, there’s another far far galaxy from a parallel universe — and suddenly the Rainbow planet appeared there for no particular reason. It had such a strong magnetic field that it practically smashed the protective barrier of the prison planet Abakaz. Many dangerous galactic criminals have managed to escape and settled in some uninhabited lands. All these unfortunate events bring us to the point where the adventures of a young hunter from planet Earth will start. It’s you, of course!
Gameplay of Pink Explorer is made to be fun & satisfying! Use double jumps, wall jumps, gravity to beat all 20 different levels! Every level has something different to offer. Many unique enemies & puzzles across all the levels!
Easy but fun controls:
Movement in this game has been made very easy to learn, no need for complex dashes or anything! The movement is very smooth and responsive to inputs!
Frogy World is 2D Platformer Game
Pass the challenging levels with parkour knowledge!
This frog is trying to pass levels that are designed differently from each other.
Bus Simulator City Ride – £29.99
Take the driver’s seat as you transport passengers around a lively city in officially licensed buses from famous manufacturers: Alexander Dennis, Blue Bird, BYD, IVECO BUS, MAN, Mercedes-Benz, Scania, Setra, Volvo, and Vicinity Motor Corp. Drive routes and complete campaign missions to unlock even more buses, districts, and routes. Climb the career ladder and build a public transport network for your city.
Poly Link – Battle Heroes – £2.99
The game is packed with many amazing heroes and cute-looking anime girls to unlock, and countless small surprises.
Train your brain and creativity and find the right perspective.
Rotate the pieces until the perspective is correct and everything fits magically together.
Relax and enjoy the masterpieces you will create as the game automatically saves each of your puzzles and combines minimalistic and fun gameplay.
Pick your weapon, your spell, your music, and you are ready to go.
Fight enemies which attack to the beat, choose perks, defeat the final boss, unlock new weapons, spells & soundtracks!
The digital chess teacher is back! This time, he will teach you chess through memorable matches from the Chess Championships.
The Battle of Polytopia – £13.99
The Battle of Polytopia is an award winning unique turn based strategy game about controlling the map, fighting enemy tribes, discovering new lands and mastering new technologies. You take on the role as the ruler of a tribe and attempt to build a civilization in a turn based competition with the other tribes.
This version includes all 12 Regular Tribes.
With millions of players, this game has quickly become one of the most popular civilization style strategy games for mobile and has been acclaimed for its sleek user interface and great depth in game play.
A young girl, Viola, is drawn inexorably to a mysterious manor that seems to change behind her back. It is a place of pain, turmoil and death. Plumb its detestable depths and abominable history. Untangle riddles that bar your perilous path. And flee the hellish halls of The Witch’s House.
The Witch’s House, originally released in 2012, falls within the tradition of Japanese horror RPGs with heavy emphasis on puzzle-solving and jump scares.
The Witch’s House is deliberately designed with traps at *almost* every turn–sudden death is unpredictable and it keeps players on their toes. Anything can happen at any time.
With completely remastered visuals, The Witch’s House MV will feel fresh to even the most familiar old-school fans. Fans will also be greeted by a new difficulty mode that includes new events upon completion of the base game.
Witchcrafty is a platformer with small metroidvania elements that immerses you in a world of magic. Something strange is happening in the Kingdom – the forests are filled with predatory plants, their peace-loving peoples have taken up arms against each other, and goblins were noticed in the deep mines. The little witch has to start her journey in search of truth and answers. Who is behind all these events? Should you trust strangers along the way? Who stole the Witch’s mail?
Trifox is a colourful and cartoonish action-adventure featuring a phenomenal fox with a multitude of talents! Choose from a trio of classes – Warrior, Mage, Engineer – or mix-and-match abilities to create a tailor-made hero!
After his home is attacked and his TV remote stolen, Trifox sets out in pursuit of the mysterious looters in an action-packed adventure. Use magic, might, and marvelous gadgets to outfox foes across four danger-filled worlds as you fight your way to a final showdown at Villain HQ!
After school, on the rooftop, drenched in the color of the setting sun…
Yukuha Tenjo confesses his love to his childhood friend and longtime crush… and gets rejected.
Suddenly, a young girl named Miu appears out of nowhere, claiming to be his “daughter from the future”.
Take the role of an elite knight and battle your way through action-packed levels with intense sword fighting gameplay in this neo-classic side scrolling action platformer. Save the city from a deadly terrorist organization hell-bent on exposing the truth you were sworn to protect.
Use the Parry and Disarm system to stay true to the Knights’ Code. Enjoy an arcade-reminiscent soundtrack as you battle the enemies of the Round Table.
– Isekai Tragic Love – – £14.29
Isekai Tragic Love is a tale of love, friendship, and betrayal between an invincible hero and his comrades in an isekai world.
It is a novel game that will touch your heart with an unfulfilled love…
This Bishojo Game originally released under the “Genyukyo” brand has been reworked for the “CS Novels” platform for players worldwide to enjoy.
ValiDate: Struggling Singles in your Area – £14.09
ValiDate is a visual novel about thirteen struggling singles navigating through soul-sucking 9-to-5s, quarter-life crises, and the harsh truths millennials learn as soon as they hit their 20’s.
Set in the Jercy City area, our cast of lovers trudge through the dregs of capitalism – a journey, a transition – a rite-of-passage that leads into uncertain mid-adulthood. On one side but not yet out on the other, 13 playable characters find romance amongst cosplay, trash mixtapes, and even poetry straight from the soul.
With over 30 routes to choose from and hours of content, the lives of these singles are in your good (or bad!) decision-making hands.
Winter Games 2023 is an exciting sports game in a modern 3D guise. The player can prove his/her athletic abilities in ten dynamic winter sports disciplines, for example, ski jumping, biathlon, ski cross, skeleton, or super-G. Set off on the hunt for records, best times, and trophies. Besides the individual disciplines there are also ready-to-play cups to choose from in which several disciplines can be played one after the other, and customized competitions you can put together yourself. Play alone against AI or compete in local multiplayer mode against up to three friends in an exciting winter sports duel.
Join a stuffed bear named Teddy on this gloomy and sinister adventure to rescue his owner, Alicia, from the realm of dreams and distorted childhood fantasies. Who else will fight for the life of the girl, now grown-up, if not her long-forgotten and dusty toy?
The Darkest Tales is a complex and compelling adventure, full of familiar characters and fairytale landscapes. Over the course of the journey, you’ll have to come face-to-face with the difficult questions of life more than once.
The fields of most famous stadiums glow under the spotlight and are ready for your team. Explore the vast amounts of uniquely designed levels and fight your way through each tournament phase! Meet the legends in the finale and show them how it is done! Claim all your trophies and become a beacon of football experience.
Football Cup 2022 introduces new teams, kit selection system, camera and animation improvements, daily quests, updated game modes, , new coin system and numerous other upgrades and optimizations.
Running an aquarium shop is a real challenge! Clients will entrust you with difficult tasks that you have to cope with. In return, a reward awaits you. Spend it on developing your business – buying new species of fish, exotic plants, equipping your store or developing your skills.
Create an aquarium in which each fish will want to live. Thanks to the variety of objects in the game, you can implement even the craziest ideas! A green, blooming oasis or raw, antique busts? The choice is yours.
Next week: Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, Persona 5 Royal, New Tales from the Borderlands, A Plague Tale: Requiem – Cloud Version, Warhammer 40,000: Shootas, Blood & Teef, Crowalt: Traces of the Lost Colony, Pnevmo-Capsula, Aery – Last Day of Earth, Forest Pop, Them’s Fightin’ Herds, Sigma Theory, Harmonia, Sea Horizon, Touhou Gouyoku Ibun ? Sunken Fossil World, Shutter Nyan! Enhanced Edition, Apré Lapli [After the rain], Seduced in the Sleepless City, One True Hero, Dead Secret Circle, and JoJo Siwa: Worldwide Party.