Troll and I.jpg

Troll and I is out now on the Switch, a somewhat under-the-radar retail release that nevertheless looks rather appealing in footage. A single player adventure, it revolves around a co-operative relationship between a young man and the troll to get through various environments and challenges.

We're working on a review, but encountered a problematic and game breaking bug around 10-15 minutes in, halting all progress; another reviewer we know (from Nintendo Insider) had the exact same issue. A description of this (from our reviewer Matt Mason) is below:

The bug happens about 10-15 minutes in, after the main character slides down a hill in a quasi-QTE sequence. You kill your first enemy and scour a clearing for crafting items, but when you have to leap over a hill to go to the next area the game falls into an endless loading screen. I've tried moving around on the hill a little bit to see if jumping off at a different spot would help, but no luck. I tried reloading about five times on Normal difficulty to no avail, so I restarted the game on both Easy and Hard to see if I could surpass the bug, but it's the same end result.

As it ended our review process we contacted Maximum Games through their representative to seek a solution, and a fix was sent back. It's oddly simple:

We believe that it is due to a memory leak in the Switch OS.  If users are experiencing issues, they can fix them by hard resetting the system.  You do this by holding down the power button, then selecting "Power Options" and "Turn Off." The next time you boot the game any issues should be fixed.

It's good that there's a solution - it's been tested and seems to clear the problem - but this is the only game we know of to date with this sort of issue related to memory access; it seems likely that poorly optimised memory management could be the issue here. At least there's a primitive workaround to get players past that chokepoint.

So there you have it, if you encounter this early game breaking bug in Troll and I, a simple reset should solve the problem.