A round of applause for you and yours — you did it! You made it through the gauntlet of 2023's brilliant video games all the way to a brand new year. Happy 2024, everyone!
With Switch entering its seventh year in 2023, our expectations — with the exception of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, of course — were relatively tempered, but it turned out to be a cracking year for Nintendo's ageing-like-a-fine-wine system, with a swathe of first- and third-party games that kept the quality up there with the very best across all platforms.
But that's all old news — the arrival of a fresh January 1st has us all looking ahead to what 2024 might bring! The big question for Nintendo fans is whether or not we'll see the fabled 'Switch 2' announced and even launched in the next 366 days. With sales of the current system slowing year-on-year, it seems highly unlikely that Switch has another 12 months to itself as the only available Nintendo hardware. Then again, given the quality of games that launched last year, it wouldn't be the end of the world from a gamer's perspective. *shiftily glances at our enormous backlog*
There are several first-party remakes and re-releases in the pipeline — a sure sign of the more junior dev teams cutting their teeth while the veterans knuckle down on killer apps for the next system.
The year kicks off with the Nintendo-published Another Code: Recollection (Jan), followed by Mario vs. Donkey Kong (Feb), Luigi's Mansion 2 HD ("Summer"), and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door ("2024") — Princess Peach: Showtime (Mar) will deliver the only totally new game on the first-party Switch slate at the time of writing. Metroid Prime 4 still has the "TBA" label, but four years after its developmental restart, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect news of that sometime this year.