The best Nintendo Switch games for 2023

In Hollow Knight, you play as a beetle-like knight wielding a nail, exploring an underground labyrinth known as Hallownest. Like many Metroidvania-style games, Hollow Knight has an emphasis on player discovery and secrets. Each section in Hollow Knight requires a map purchased from the mapmaker, typically located in a hard-to-find spot. That means you stumble into new biomes and encounter new enemies without much sense of direction. It’s thrilling and ups the sense of discovery. Hallownest is a sprawling world that takes dozens of hours to fully uncover. With great, minimalistic platforming mechanics and tough boss fights galore, Hollow Knight is as fun to look at and explore as it is a great combat experience. Look out for the upcoming sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong.

The first traditional entry in the series to hit Nintendo Switch, Fire Emblem: Three Houses manages to improve just about every element, ranging from combat to character development. Taking a page out of the Path of Radiance playbook, the game stars a mercenary-turned-professor rather than the endless number of princes we’ve seen in other games. It’s your responsibility to pick one of the titular three houses and train them, building relationships and learning about the situations that brought them to the game’s central monastery. When things pop off, however, the Three Houses is classic Fire Emblem game goodness. Turn-based strategy combat has rarely been this polished, providing you with numerous options in how you approach any scenario based on the way you have developed your roster. Special “Combat Arts” and the new Battalion system are two more tools in your chest, and the normal difficulty strikes a balance between challenging and accessible.

Serving as Kirby’s first fully 3D adventure since the Crystal Shards on N64, Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a major change of pace for the series. Sure, it still feels like a Kirby game, allowing you to consume enemies to gain new powers, but its presentation is more polished than ever. You might not realize it at first, but this game is actually set in a post-apocalyptic world, mirroring the likes of popular AAA games like Horizon Forbidden West. But of course, this is a Nintendo game, so you won’t be battling creepy zombies or anything like that. Instead, you’ll enjoy new mechanics like Kirby’s Mouthful Mode, which causes the character to take the shape of objects he consumes. For instance, you can eat a car, and in doing so, Kirby is sort of molded around the vehicle in a humorous way. As expected, Kirby and the Forgotten Land is absolutely brimming with personality and is an approachable platformer that will no doubt make you smile.

For over two decades, Nintendo fans begged the company to make a sequel to Pokémon Snap. The N64 classic was a beloved hit thanks to its intuitive photography gameplay and charming use of the franchise. It was a long wait, but it was worth it in the end. New Pokémon Snap is a delightful follow-up that feels right at home on the Nintendo Switch. For fans of the original, it doesn’t stray from what made that version work. It features relaxing, on-rails gameplay that lets players lay back and take some cute snaps. The sequel really shines when it comes to content. The original game was extremely short, making it a perfect Blockbuster rental. This new version is much more robust. There are over 210 Pokémon to snap, each of which has four distinct poses. There are way more courses to explore, which have several variants. Side requests give players around 200 bonus goals to complete on top of the already beefy 12-hour story. To top it all off, the game has a photo editor and an online social component where players can share their best snaps. For those who just want to live in the world of Pokémon, it’s a much more fully realized version of Snap that’s perfect for lazy Sundays on the couch.

Few indie games have ever been as successful as Eric Barone’s Stardew Valley. The first-time developer spent five years creating a spiritual successor to the farming RPG Harvest Moon, and when he finally completed the game, what he had made was even more impressive than its influences. Mixing classic farming mechanics with exploration, relationships, and even some combat, Stardew Valley is much more ambitious than its 16-bit visuals indicate. It also happens to be one of the best Nintendo Switch games to play in handheld mode during commutes, as there is always something you can do to pass the time. Whether you’re interested in fishing, finding a husband or wife, or mining for minerals, it’s possible in Stardew Valley, and you can just feel the love that went into the game’s development.