It’s worth giving these games another look
You may not be familiar with many of the names in this week’s Nintendo eShop, but now’s a great time to get acquainted with them. While the update is headlined by titles like another entry in the Scribblenauts series, the surprise release of Outlast and the return of Fear Effect, it’s the more niche ports that most demand your attention.
Out today is Subsurface Circular, which Bithell Games launched on Steam last year with little warning. It’s an interactive short story that depends on dialogue-based puzzles, as you explore a mysterious world in which robots live among humans. It’s a marked change from Volume, Bithell Games’ stylish stealth adventure from 2015, but Subsurface Circular is just as worth a playthrough.
There’s also a Switch version of A Normal Lost Phone, the first in a pair of mobile games that turn your smartphone into someone else’s. Taking possession of an unlocked, abandoned phone, you sift through its files and applications to figure out who and where its owner is. It may sound voyeuristic — especially since A Normal Lost Phone’s story deals with a teenager’s disappearance — but we still found the Lost Phone games to be some of 2017’s most fascinating. (It’ll be interesting to see how the smartphone interface translates to Switch, though.)
And then there’s Detention, a Taiwan-based horror game that has only grown its cult fan base since it launched last January. Survival horror somehow seems scarier when it’s presented as a 2D side-scroller, and this one has some creepily beautiful visuals to boot. On Steam, more than 5,000 reviewers have highly recommended this game for how it turns its high school setting into an absolute nightmare.
The full list of Switch eShop games and demos coming through next Wednesday is below.
