I'm a sucker for sales. I always pick up one or two Switch games each month because of them. But in the past couple of weeks, in no small part due to the coronavirus, I've picked up TEN Switch games, and due to my cheap-ass disposition, they're all under $20 each. Some were under $0.10. For better or worse, there are a lot of games on the eShop, and while some of them are great, some definitely aren't. But sometimes, you find a diamond in the rough, a game that you've either never heard of or doesn't look great, that you end up having a lot of fun with. Have you encountered this? What Switch games do you own that you feel are underrated, underappreciated, or simply unknown?
Nuclear Throne is awesome, but it’s never on sale. Definitely worth it regardless for those who like twin stick shooters. I’m waiting for The Sexy Brutale to go on sale before I get it. It is supposed to be a good puzzle adventure game that was highly rated on release.
Gorogoa is one I don’t think many have played, but absolutely should check out. It’s a seemless blend of puzzles and narrative that I loved from start to finish.
@WaFfLeKnIgHt Forgotton Anne Really is great! There's a demo on eshop. I very rarely finish games, but I played this until I finished it. Took about 8-10 hours to finish.
@SKTTR Those are some good picks. There are still well-known games like Blazing Chrome and La Mulana that I want to play, but Argarta-S and The Count Lucanor sound interesting.
@Anti-Matter You never understand the meaning of hidden gems. Half your games have demos and the other half is well-known.
All the games he listed are reasonably obscure (or at least not household names), and why does it matter if they have demos? People on this website seem to take issue with everything Anti-Matter says, I don't get it.
Anyway, I don't have many especially obscure games on the Switch but a few that could be described as hidden gems are:
Bomb Chicken (a really good puzzle platformer)
Submerged (a walking simulator made by some former Bioshock devs - there's not much in the way of gameplay or story but it's a nice relaxing game, worth getting on sale)
Membrane (a puzzle platformer that's often very cheap on sale - I haven't played much of it because I got stuck early on, but it's pretty fun)
If you consider visual novels, I'd say Tokyo School Life is a hidden gem. In this visual novel, you play as a foreign exchange student in Tokyo and you meet three girls and get to know them. It is a dating sim, but there's a bit more to the story than just that, like the three problems each girl has.
Twinkle Star Sprites, part of the Arcade Archives series, it's a cute 'em up. While the game looks really cute and colorful, underneath is a shmup where shooting enemies, sends stuff over to your opponent's side causing chaos for the other player. It's kind of like a shmup meets a vs. puzzle game.
A third one I've played, A Magical High School Girl. This is a rogue-like RPG, where you can name spells, and depending on what you name the spell, the action of the spell is different. Name it after ice or snow, you get an ice attack. Name it after fire, a fire attack. It's a unique concept I haven't seen used in other games (unless there's one I don't know of)
The resident Trolls superfan! Saw Trolls Band Together via early access and absolutely loved it!
The Count Lucanor is a very nice and dark horror adventure with good puzzles and interesting NPCs. Every decision matters. It has 5 different endings that are all worth it if you're into the story.
Agartha-S is a cool action platformer where every pixel is physics based. Heated ocean pixels turn to steam pixels that then begin to rain down as water pixels. It's got that growth-sim flair where every element is in constant interaction with its surroundings. The rather small stages sometimes have hidden exits that lead to another stage on the map. It has 8 vastly different unlockable characters and 5 bosses. I was addicted to this little gem and 100%ed it.
La-Mulana is a top game though, not really a hidden gem. It's the best metroidvania I ever played, well, apart from Super Metroid.
I'm just saying. If there's a free Switch demo for everyone to download it's automatically not a hidden gem anymore. I do not exaggerate. Five out of the ten games he listed have demos: Sushi Strikers, Portal Knights, Lost Sphear, Earthlock, and 99 Vidas. And the others were talked about a lot. Poi was the first real 3D platformer for Switch, Yonder is a game people still are talking about tons and you can find it in every store, Penguin Wars and Waku Waku are old classic franchises. That only leaves Evoland that I personally can count as a hidden gem. I don't take issue with everything he says.
Back to Bed - A brilliant 3D puzzler with some beautiful, Escher-like aesthetics.
Hard West - An isometric turn-based strategy/shooter game in a comic book Wild-West style.
Joe Dever's Lone Wolf - Remember those books in which you could choose your own story or ending? Well, this is that, and a bit more, because it mixes interactive story telling with turn-based strategy elements in a medieval/dungeons & dragons setting, so if you like either of those, then it's well worth a look.
OTTTD - Over The Top Tower Defence. The name says it all. It's tower defense but mixed with RPG elements, with a cartoonish look. It's made by the people that also made Death Squared.
Apocryph - basically a love letter to classic 3D shooters like Doom, Quake, Hexen, Heretic and Rise of the Triad.
Forma.8 - A stylish, sci-fi inspired game about a tiny floating robot lost on an alien planet, that mixes Metroidvania with puzzle elements, and binds it altogether as one big, interesting adventure. The game has a demo, so you can try it for free.
@Dogorilla Portal Knights, Sushi Strikers, Yonder: the Cloud Catcher Chronicles, Lost Sphear, Evoland and Earthlock are hardly obscure games. They are well known (at least for most of us), have had several extensive reviews on this and on other sites, and many of them have large fan bases/audiences.
The very definition of a hidden gem is a game that hardly anyone knows, or is so buried underneath a wealth of more commonly known titles, that you might unfortunately overlook it, while it could still be very much worth the effort of looking into it and/or playing it.
So, as such, the criticism is very much warranted.
@SKTTR@ThanosReXXX They're not the most obscure games in the world, but they are games that many casual Switch players won't have heard of or might overlook. I check this site daily so I know about a lot of Switch games, and yet I've never heard of Evoland or Waku Waku Sweets, and I don't know much about most of the other games he mentioned. And I don't agree that having a demo affects whether a game is a hidden gem or not; a lot of games have demos so it's still easy to overlook some games that do.
That's not really the point though. Regardless of how well-known or otherwise they are, I just think it was unnecessary to call him out for his games not being obscure enough, when he was just contributing to the thread and doing nothing wrong.
@Dogorilla I personally don't mind the demos, as you can see from my own recommendations, so that's more something that SKTTR noted, but as mentioned, I do think that the games that Anti-Matter mentioned just don't fall into the category hidden gems. And not just because I know them, but also because quite a few of them are nothing special, so quite ordinary or simple games, another box they don't tick when it comes to them being eligible to get the "hidden gem" label. Otherwise, if even average or bad games would count as such, then they'd probably be called "hidden turds" instead...
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
I'm a bit reticent to post in this thread because the 'Hidden Gem' snobs are out in force already, but **** 'em 😝
If someone asked me to suggest Switch games that:
I've played,
are great (in the context of the type of game that they're trying to be),
are cheap
are not mainstream enough to obviously not be worthy of the 'hidden' label (how can any game really be classed as hidden when they're pretty much all easily viewable on the eshop, aside from the likes of LABO and Ring-Fit?)
...then I would offer up the following:
Bleed 1 & 2 - Only actually played some of 1 so far, but 2 has a better metacritic score so am assuming it's as good as, if not better than, 1. Great fun if you can work with twin stick shooting and like Bullet Time (does anyone not like Bullet Time?)
ATOMIK RunGunJumpGun - a very simple auto-runner. But the challenge, combined with the instant return to the start after each failure, make it very 'OneMoreTry-able', and it has a cool audio and visual style.
Check them both out if you like cheap video game fun and haven't tried them. Then come and thank me.
Or come and give me stick for bothering to contribute. Up to you.
You guys had me at blood and semen.
What better way to celebrate than firing something out of the pipe?
@gcunit Hey! You scoundrel...
All kidding aside though, the ones you posted actually DO fit the bill, so worthy additions, far as I'm concerned.
On a side note: you did kind of misunderstand the label "hidden gem" there, in some respects. It's not about it not being viewable, it's about good or entertaining games being overlooked by the masses, due to a number of reasons, which could either be that it's buried underneath too many other releases of games in the eShop or for example that it didn't get enough coverage in the media, for whatever reason.
And they don't have to be cheap either. Hidden gems can also be rare games. But for the Switch, that category will still take some time, seeing as it really hasn't any hard to come by titles yet, and probably won't for quite some time to come.
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
I feel as though Hand of Fate 2 never gets enough love. The developer, Defiant Development, had to close their doors last year because their games didn't sell well enough. Hand of Fate is a mashup of genres. Board game, dungeon crawler, ccg deck building, adventure, and action/rpg.
Switch Physical Collection - 1,247 games (as of April 15th, 2024)
Favorite Quote: "Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age the child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies." -Edna St. Vincent Millay
@Magician Hand of Fate 2 looks like a very nice game, but I struggle to see myself ever finding the time/inclination to commit card games. I can't be bothered to work out what's going on in Gwent when playing Switcher 3, if that's any indication. So the asking price doesn't work for me.
@ThanosReXXX As a gesture of peace and love I have just bought OTTTD, Joe Dever's Lone Wolf, and Back to Bed, thank you very much. I would have possibly gone for Apocryph too but I saw no mention of gyro controls in the eshop listing so that'll have to wait for a deep sale, and I have looked at Hard West once or twice, but I find the aesthetics of the UI slightly off-putting for now.
@gcunit Yeah, I'd agree on your criticism concerning Hard West, but it's a minor thing, and the game itself is more than good enough to mitigate that small downside.
As for no gyro on Apocryph: I personally hate gyro controls. It makes me contort my arms and wrists in unnatural positions, so I'd rather stick with normal thumbstick controls, therefore that's not an issue for me. And the price is already pretty low, so you must be waiting for bargain bin prices, then...
What I usually do, is just put all of these games in my wish list, so I can keep track of any upcoming discounts. I'm still waiting for a massive discount on Rogue Trooper: Quartz Zone Massacre. In case you don't know it yet: it's a great third person shooter with a really interesting story, based upon a comic of the same name. It was on sale once, but I sadly missed it, because I didn't have it on my wish list yet, and now it's just sticking to it's original price, so I'm still waiting for it to drop again...
Be sure to let me know what you thought of the games you did buy. I do hope that the later levels in Back to Bed aren't going to want to make you throw your Switch into a wall, because they can be pretty frustrating and pin-point precise, where timing and placement of items is concerned...
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
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Topic: Hidden Gems of the Switch eShop
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