The 2024 Nintendo Switch Games You Can't Afford to Miss

Video games have been around for a very long time, but Thank Goodness You’re Here! managed to coin a new sub-genre this year. Described by its makers as a comedy slapformer, you play as a travelling salesman who arrives at a fictional town in Yorkshire (yes that’s the UK's Yorkshire) and quickly finds himself running all manner of errands for the eccentric locals.

The game itself is remarkably simple, using only a couple of buttons, but it’s also incredibly inventive and chock full of funny gags and foul-mouthed Britishisms delivered by the likes of Matt Berry, whose euphemistic turn as a gardener is a highlight. It might be over in a few hours, but you’ll enjoy every minute of your time in Barnsworth. Just remember you give everything a good slap.

It was a strong year for Nintendo princesses. Over in Hyrule it was Zelda’s time to shine, while Mario was given the day off in Princess Peach: Showtime!, a simple but enjoyable action-adventure outing in which the Mushroom Kingdom monarch is able to don a variety of costumes that turn her into everything from a sword fighter and a superhero, to a pâtissier and a detective.

Peach is tasked with rescuing her favourite theatre from some generic baddies, and each level takes the shape of a stage play. While the game is definitely aimed at the younger end of Nintendo’s sizeable audience, Princess Peach: Showtime! is a charming and consistently varied outing that proves there’s plenty of fun to be had without the plumber in tow.

Swedish Indie developer Simogo’s previous game was Sayona Wild Hearts, a critically acclaimed playable synthpop album that anyone could see through to the end. Its latest game was no less well received, but you’ll need to fill a notebook with scribbles and drawings if you want to solve every fiendish brain teaser in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. This incredibly stylish and unapologetically difficult puzzle game will have you pulling your hair out for hours, and punching the air with glee when you make progress.

You play as a woman invited to explore an eerie mansion located somewhere in central Europe, with the answers you seek hidden behind a series of locked doors. To open them, you’ll wander the halls of the house - often hopelessly for a time - searching for solutions and environmental cues hidden in old movie posters, carefully placed notes and strange phone calls. Somehow, every conundrum in this dizzyingly intricate puzzle box can be overcome using a single button, and while Lorelei and the Laser Eyes might be the most patience-testing game you can play on your Switch this year, it might also be the most rewarding.

Fans of Mario RPGs have been spoilt for choice in the last year. While it was exciting to get a new entry in the Mario & Luigi series at the end of 2024, we can’t help but give the nod to the splendid remake Nintendo Switch remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door that arrived in the summer. The beloved GameCube original turned 20 this year, but has lost none of its charm, with a script that remains the funniest ever penned in a Nintendo game.

In his quest to find the seven Crystal Stars needed to open the titular Thousand-Year Door, the plumber and his party of eccentric tagalongs compete in a wrestling tournament, travel to space and liberate a cursed village whose residents have been turned into pigs. With a deceptively deep battle system, a remastered soundtrack and stunning papercraft visuals, there’s never been a better time to play one of Mario's best ever games.

Play Animal Well for 10 minutes and you’ll probably think you have a pretty good grasp on what it is: 2D Metroidvania-style exploration, puzzle-solving favoured over combat, and some pretty creepy animals that will kill you without hesitation. All of that is accurate, but Animal Well - a game somehow made by just one person - will only reveal its true self to those players who put the time in to unravel its many mysteries.

Some might find the lack of direction frustrating at first. You play as a little blob thing and are told precisely nothing about why said blob finds itself at the bottom of a deeply creepy well, or where it’s supposed to go. But gradually you amass an assortment of items, from firecrackers to a bubble wand and a slinky (take that Samus), which help you gain entry to new areas of the map. Pay attention to the small environmental cues and you’ll learn the game’s language pretty quickly, but only those who stick around long after the credits will get to see how amazing Animal Well really is.

The Prince of Persia series is older than Sonic the Hedgehog, Tomb Raider and Crash Bandicoot, but somehow it took until 2024 for Ubisoft to realise its long-running series is a perfect fit for the Metroidvania template. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is not only a successful reinvention though. It’s easily one of the best games in its very crowded genre.

Ubisoft’s Montpellier studio got pretty much everything right with The Lost Crown, from the meticulously designed Mount Qaf, where the game is set, to the precision platforming, fantastic combat and signature Prince of Persia time manipulation abilities. One of Ubisoft’s best efforts in years.

Her name might be plastered all over the box, but until this year Princess Zelda had never actually been the star of a The Legend of Zelda game. At first glance, Echoes of Wisdom looks to be a return to the more traditional 2D Zelda template after last year’s open-world behemoth, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. But the latest entry arguably has more in common with the latter than A Link to the Past of old.

The big hook here is an item called the Tri Rod, which allows Hyrule’s most famous royal to create “echoes” of things she finds in the world, from boxes and beds to pretty much every enemy type. These can then be deployed in combat and puzzle scenarios, with the game content to let you try to break it using imaginative solutions. By combining old-school dungeons and map design with this more freeform approach, Echoes of Wisdom is at its best a thrillingly experimental spin on a well-trodden formula.

You can play Balatro - probably the biggest out-of-nowhere breakthrough hit of 2024 - on just about any platform you like, but as this game that mercilessly devours your free time, the ability to take the Switch version wherever you like makes it an irresistible proposition. In case it somehow passed you by this year, Balatro is a roguelike deck building game that asks you to take everything you know (or don’t) about the centuries old game of poker and go out of your way to cheat your way to victory.

Rather than competing against other players, you progress by beating a series of “blinds” using genuine poker hands. That’s the simple part, but in Balatro you can upgrade your hands to amass more chips, and use special joker cards to add increasingly bonkers multipliers to your score. Like the very best roguelike games, Balatro has a one-more-run moreishness baked into its design that makes it near impossible to put down once it has got its claws into you.

The Mario Party series has been a reliable go-to multiplayer game since it debuted in the late ‘90s, and the Nintendo Switch has been treated to several entries. Super Mario Party Jamboree will be the system’s last, and it might just be the best one ever to boot. There are over 110 minigames to play through - the most of any game in the series to date - and shockingly nearly all of them are fun.

From a Donkey Konga-inspired rhythm game to pinball, Yoshi racing and motion-controlled minigolf, there’s so much variety that even if you’re not keen on a game you only have to wait a minute or two for one you probably will enjoy. Nintendo has added a single-player story mode of sorts, and you can compete against strangers online, but Super Mario Party Jamboree is at its very best with a group of friends or family ready and willing to look daft in the name of competition.

The Super Monkey Ball series has been around for a long time, but Sega's struggles to reach the heights of the early GameCube titles leave longterm fans going into each new entry often expecting the worst. What a nice surprise it was, then, when this year’s Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble turned out to be the best Monkey Ball in years. The physics system - often the main point of contention for hardcore Monkey Ballers - is spot on, while the new Spin Dash system adds just enough to the game without overcomplicating what is still a gloriously simple arcade experience.

The 200 levels that make up a generous single-player campaign start off simple enough, but your simian skills will be tested to the max if you want to conquer them all. Monkey Ball fans shouldn’t miss this one.