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Just five years ago, Nintendo was at a crossroads. The Wii U was languishing well in third place in the console wars. After considerable pressure, the company made its first tentative steps into mobile gaming with Miitomo and Super Mario Run. Fast-forward to today: The Switch is likely on the way to becoming the company’s best-selling “home console” ever, and seven Switch games have outsold the Wii U console. Everything’s coming up Nintendo, then, thanks to the Switch’s unique hybrid format and an ever-growing game library with uncharacteristically third-party solid support.
However, Switch’s online store isn’t the easiest to navigate, so this guide aims to help the uninitiated start their journey on the right foot. These are the games you should own — for now. We regularly revise and add to the list as appropriate. Oh, and if you’ve got a Switch Lite, don’t worry: Every game on the list is fully supported by the portable-only console.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the best game in the series yet. It streamlines many clunky aspects from earlier games and motivates players to keep shaping their island community. The sound design reaches ASMR levels of brain-tingling comfort. As you’d expect, it also looks better than any previous entry, giving you more reason to fill up your virtual home and closet. And yes, it certainly helps that New Horizons is an incredibly soothing escape from reality when we’re all stuck at home amid a global pandemic.
Buy Animal Crossing: New Horizons at Amazon — $59.99
Astral Chain
I was on the fence about Astral Chain from the day the first trailer came out until a few hours into my playthrough. It all felt a little too generic, almost a paint-by-numbers rendition of an action game. I needn’t have been so worried, as it’s one of the more original titles from PlatinumGames, the developer behind the Bayonetta series, in recent years.
In a future where the world is under constant attack from creatures on another plane of existence, you play as an officer in a special force dealing with this threat. The game’s gimmick is that you can tame these creatures to become Legions that you use in combat. Encounters play out with you controlling your character and the Legion simultaneously to deal with waves of mobs and more prominent, more challenging enemies. As well as for combat, you’ll use your Legion(s) to solve crimes and traverse environments.
The story starts well enough but quickly devolves into a mashup of anime tropes, including twists and arcs ripped straight from famous shows and films. Astral Chain sticks closely to a loop of detective work, platforming puzzles, and combat — a little too closely, if I’m being critical — with the game split into cases that serve as chapters. However, the minute-to-minute gameplay is enough to keep you engaged through the 20-hour or so primary campaign and into the reasonably useful end-game content.
Does Astral Chain Reach the Heights of Nier: Automata? No, not at all, but its combat and environments can often surpass that game, which, all told, is probably my favorite of this generation. Constantly available for under $50 these days, it’s well worth your time.
Buy Astral Chain at Amazon — $59.99
Celeste
Celeste is a lot of things. It’s a great platformer, but it’s also a puzzle game. It’s incredibly punishing, but it’s also very accessible. It puts gameplay above everything, but it has a great story. It’s a beautiful, moving, and memorable contradiction of a game created by MattMakesGames, the indie studio behind the excellent Towerfall. So, Celeste is worth picking up no matter what platform you own, but its room-based levels and clear 2D artwork make it a fantastic game to play on the Switch when on the go.
Buy Celeste at Amazon — $19.88
Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age
Dragon Quest XI is an unashamedly traditional Japanese role-playing game. Most of the characters are established RPG tropes: mute protagonist-who’s-actually-a-legendary-hero, sister mages, mysterious rogue, and others. Then there’s the battle system, which has barely changed in the decades of the series. (There’s a reason that this special edition features a 16-bit styled version of the game: The mechanics and story work just as well in more… graphically constrained surroundings.) While the story hits many familiar RPG beats, everything takes an exciting turn later. And through it, the game demands completion. RPGs require compelling stories, and this has one. It just doesn’t quite kick in until later.
This eleventh iteration of the series also serves as a celebration of all things Dragon Quest. Without getting too deep into the story, the game heavily references the first game in the same narrative universe, just hundreds of years later.
The Switch edition doesn’t offer the most polished take on the game — it’s available on rival consoles — but the characters, designed by Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball fame, move around fluidly, in plenty of detail despite the limits of the hybrid console. And while it’s hard to explain, There’s something just plain right about playing a traditional JRPG on a Nintendo console.
Buy Dragon Quest XI S at Amazon — $60.99
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Fire Emblem: Three Houses is one hell of a game. Developer Intelligent Systems made a lot of tweaks to its formula for the series’ first outing on the Nintendo Switch, and the result of those changes is a game that marries Fire Emblem’s dual personalities in a meaningful and satisfying way. You’ll spend half your time as a master tactician, commanding troops around varied and enjoyable battlefields. The other half? You’ll teach students and build relationships as a professor at the finest school in the land.
Buy Fire Emblem: Three Houses at GameStop — $59.99
Hades
Hades was the first early access title to make our best PC game list, and the final game is a perfect fit for Nintendo Switch. It’s an action RPG developed by the team behind Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre. You play Zagreus, son of Hades, who’s having a little spat with his dad and wants to escape from the underworld. To do so, Zagreus has to fight his way through the various levels of the underworld and up to the surface. Each class is divided into rooms full of demons, items, and the occasional miniboss. Along the way, you’ll pick up “boons” from a wide range of ancient deities like Zeus, Ares, and Aphrodite, which have additional effects on your attacks.
As Hades is a “roguelike” game, you start at the same place every time, with the levels rearranged. With that said, the items you collect can be used to access and upgrade new weapons and abilities that stick between sessions. Hades initially caught our attention for its gameplay: You can jump in for 30 minutes and have a blast or find yourself playing for hours. As the game neared its final release, the storytelling, world-building, and general character started to take shape — there’s so much to do, so many people to meet, and even some romance stuffed in there. You could play for hundreds of hours and still have fun.
Buy Hades at Gamestop — $24.99
Hollow Knight
This was a real sleeper hit and one of the very few Kickstarter games to live up to and exceed expectations. Hollow Knight is a 2D action-adventure game in the Metroidvania style, but it’s also just a mood. Set in a vast, decrepit land, you’ll explore gradually as you unlock new movement and attack skills for your character, a Burtonesque bug-like creature. Short on dialogue and narrative, the developers instead convey a story through environment and atmosphere, which nails it.
You’ll start out feeling reasonably powerless, but Hollow Knight has a perfect difficulty curve, always allowing you to progress but never making it easy. For example, it borrows the Dark Souls mechanic, where you’ll need to travel back to your corpse upon death to retrieve your “Geo” (the game’s stand-in for Souls), which is always a tense time. Throughout it all, though, the enemies and NPCs will never fail to delight. For a moody game, it has an excellent sense of humor and fun imbued mostly through the beautifully animated and voiced folks you meet. Given its low cost and extremely high quality, there’s no reason not to get this game. Trust us; it’ll win you over.
Buy Hollow Knight at Amazon — $14.99
Into The Breach
When is a turn-based strategy game, not a turn-based strategy game? Into the Breach an indie roguelike game where you control mechs to stem an alien attack defies conventions, and is all the better for it. While its core mechanics are very much in the XCOM (or Fire Emblem, for that matter) mold, it’s what it does with those mechanics that is so interesting. A traditional turn-based strategy game plays out like a game of chess — you plan a move while predicting what your opponent will do in return, thinking ahead to what you’ll do next, and so on, with the eventual goal of forcing them into a corner and winning. At the start of every Into the Breach turn, the game politely tells you precisely what each enemy character will do, down the exact square they’ll end on, and how much damage they’ll inflict. There are no hit percentages, random events, or luck; each turn is a puzzle with definitive answers to how exactly you will come out on top.
Into the Breach, battles are short and, being a roguelike, designed to be very replayable. Once you’ve mastered the basics and reached the end, there are numerous different mechs with new attack and defense mechanics to learn and master as you mix and match to build your favorite team. This is a must-have if you’re a fan of either puzzle or turn-based strategy games.
Buy Into The Breach at Amazon — $14.89
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild signals the most significant shift in the series since the Nintendo 64’s Ocarina of Time, and it might well be one of the best games of the past decade. It pulls the long-running series into modern gaming, with a perfectly pitched difficulty curve and an incredible open world to play with. There’s crafting, weapons that degrade, almost too much to collect and do, and a gentle story hidden away for players to discover for themselves. Even without the entertaining DLC add-ons, there’s so much to do here and challenges for every level of gamer.
Buy Breath of the Wild at Amazon — $47.99
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
If Breath of the Wild shows The Legend of Zelda at its most ambitious and expansive, Link’s Awakening takes things back to where the series started, in all its top-down glory. It’s an entirely faithful remake of the 1993 Game Boy classic, but the graphics and sound have been brought into the present, and a few quality-of-life tweaks have been made to smooth things out.
It’s perhaps the best game you could pick to introduce a kid to the Zelda series, but it’s also a nostalgic trip worth taking for those who played the original in all its monochrome glory. The visual style is charming and unique to the series; the combination of minor, toy-like characters and tilt-shift perspective makes the game look unlike any other Zelda title. Despite its age, the puzzles can be challenging without making you tear your hair out.
