Topic: Cookie Clicker

Cookie Clicker has released on consoles today, including Nintendo Switch.

Playsaurus has worked on the port, and as of writing, people do not seem to be pleased with the port in its current state.

I have paid and played it, and unfortunately I agree, It uses a virtual mouse that snaps to menus and lags when doing so, making it very hard to navigate the UI (there’s no touchscreen support). There’s various achievements that appear in the stats menu (such as Dunk the Cookie) that are simply impossible in the console version), the text doesn’t scale very well, renaming your bakery is bugged, etc etc etc. Hopefully these things can be fixed in the future but unfortunately, it seems like Cookie Clicker’s port is another case of “release now, fix later”.

What do you guys think? It feels too unfinished for me at the moment for me to recommend.

Unfortunately, yeah the Switch version of Cookie Clicker cannot be recommended.
The performance is abysmal, the controls are painfully unresponsive at times, and the maximum resolution seems to be 720p which is okay for handheld, but looks soft and fuzzy in docked.
Ironically, the game looks better on TV if you set the video output to 720p.

I played it long enough to get the "True Neverclick" shadow achievement since it's a neat thing to do, but wanted to leave it there.
The lack of touch screen support, keyboard or mouse support, is pretty shocking. You can't rename your bakery (so you can't do the Orteil / Ortiel easter egg), and the maximum clicking speed makes it impossible to get the "Uncanny Clicker" achievement.

If I had to guess why the performance is so bad, I would hazard a guess that the game is running something Chromium or the Electron framework, so it's just the HTML/JS game running in a sandboxed environment on the Switch hardware.
The game crunches numbers like crazy on every tick to calculate your cookie earnings and the myriad factors with all the different buildings and upgrades, it's no small feat. Pair that with the Switch's lacking single threaded performance and that's probably why the game chugs so much on a stock Switch.
Would be curious to see how the game performs on Switch 2, but it seems like the performance is a hard restriction and not some shortfall.

I do admit, them not recreating the game specifically for consoles is scummy, but it was probably a smart choice. Recreating the game would take a long time, so its best to just take the release version and altar it and readjust for consoles. Games not being complete on launch is now an overly-accepted issue. It was stupid that they didn't just remove or rework the "Cookie-dunker" and "Stifling the press" achievement and even more stupid that they didn't fix the name issue. I'm sure every one of these issues will be fixed in an upcoming patch, but until then, this will go down as one of the worst console ports in indie game history.