Entering 2024 with the potential arrival of a Nintendo Switch 2, the Nintendo Switch already has an amazing lineup of games available. The hybrid portable console has surpassed the PlayStation 4 and Game Boy to become the third best-selling console of all time with over 132.46 million units sold, Nintendo Switch Online has added Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games, and Nintendo struck a 10-year deal with Microsoft to port Call of Duty to future Nintendo consoles. While Call of Duty fans wait for the first wave of ports, here are the 25 best Switch games you can play to hold you over.
But what do we mean by “best?” To be very clear, this is not an attempt at an “objective” ranking that will indisputably line up with the tastes of gamers of all types. That, sadly, can never exist; when one person’s epic RPG masterpiece is another’s boring and impenetrable slog, they’ll never see eye to eye on where that game should rank against others of different genres.
Instead, this is a list of games that IGN’s crew of Switch gamers recommend as a group, ranked using our Face-Off tool so that everybody – including our NVC Podcast hosts – got to weigh in equally on which games they thought should be placed above others. It’s presented in the spirit of recognizing games we love, and encouraging others to try them if you haven’t.
With only 25 slots to fill, there are tons of amazing recent games that didn’t float to the top – but that doesn’t mean we don’t think they’re awesome, too! Everybody who participated in voting has tons of personal favorites that didn’t gain quite enough traction with the group to make the cut, which is inevitable when there are this many games and so many different perspectives.
Most importantly, remember that this list is just our group’s picks and is no more “right” or “wrong” than a list that you create yourself. Speaking of which: if you have your own ranking you’d like to put out into the world, we’d like to invite you to make your own top 25 (or top 100!) list of Switch games using our Playlist tool and share it in the comments.
So without further ado, these are our picks for the 25 best Nintendo Switch games. You can also check out our list of the top free Switch games for additional picks.
More on the Best of Nintendo:
While many hit Nintendo games like Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, and Metroid Dread revel in colorful bombast and action, Captain Toad showcases the smaller, whimsical side of Nintendo's creativity. Weighed down by a backpack as big as he is, Captain Toad navigates diorama-like puzzle boxes in search of treasure. Each little level bursts with detail: secret corners, invisible secrets, clever mechanisms all wait for anyone patient enough to fiddle with the toy long enough to find them. And "a toy" is just what Captain Toad feels like, hearkening back to Nintendo's old days as a playing card company.
Its levels take on a tactile component, Rubix Cube-like, needing to be rotated, poked at, and scoured completely before they give up their last secrets. Captain Toad's (and yes, his brave buddy Toadette's too!) adventures were some of the best the Wii U had to offer, and are fully worthy of the port from the Wii U to Switch, which also added 18 new levels and co-op multiplayer. Ten years from its first release, Captain Toad: Treasure tracker remains one of the best games on not one, but two Nintendo consoles.
Fire Emblem Engage prioritizes and polishes the series’ iconic tactical combat with UI improvements, the return of the tactical weapon triangle, and the introduction of the titular Engage mechanic, which allows your units to temporarily fuse with heroes from Fire Emblem’s past. From Marth and Roy to Ike and Byleth, these legendary heroes grant your units access to flashy, powerful skills, weapons, and attacks, and play into Engage’s classic tale of good versus evil. It’s an excellent entry in the 30-year-old franchise that incorporates Fire Emblem’s rich history without being prohibitive to series newcomers.
There’s something about Slay the Spire’s balance of strategy and randomness that makes it an endlessly replayable puzzle. Assembling that perfect combo of synergistic cards can feel incredible, but there’s also a joy in scraping your way to victory despite the odds never quite falling in your favor. With that potent package on the Switch’s mobile platform — with some fairly decent touch control options, we might add — it’s a miracle we’ve ever stopped playing it.
Slay the Spire made our updated list of the 10 best roguelikes.
Stardew Valley is a wonderfully open-ended farming sim. You’ll forge your own country path with fishing, fighting, farming, and falling in love. Additionally, being able to take advantage of the Switch’s sleep mode helps take some of the pressure off of not being able to save in the middle of a day, even if a few other bugs in the port are still waiting to be squashed here.
Stardew Valley is now available on Apple Arcade as Stardew Valley+, and is one of the best iPhone games around.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is one of the biggest and best JRPGs available on Switch. Its fantastical world, endearing characters, and ultimately satisfying story make this 150-hour epic a journey well worth taking. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 also features the series’ best side quests and most varied combat to date, thanks to its new class-swapping mechanic.
Celeste is a surprise masterpiece. Its 2D platforming is some of the best and toughest since Super Meat Boy, with levels that are as challenging to figure out as they are satisfying to complete. But the greatest triumph of Celeste is that its best-in-class jumping and dashing is blended beautifully with an important and sincere story and an incredible soundtrack that make it a genuinely emotional game, even when your feet are planted firmly on the ground.
The developer's next game is Earthblade, a "2D explor-action game in a seamless pixel art world" due out in 2024.
With its charming, toyetic visual style and bizarrely dark undertones, the vast island of Koholint in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening has never looked better than it does on Nintendo Switch. Link’s shipwrecked adventure on a mysterious island rife with eccentric characters and sprawling dungeons has always been one of the stranger Zelda stories, and this remake allows new audiences and aging fans alike to appreciate it on a modern system. It modernizes the classic beloved Zelda game with a shiny new coat of paint, some excellent quality of life improvements, and loads more hidden collectibles but, ultimately, its greatest accomplishment is retaining the weird, haunting, beautiful feeling of the original Game Boy game.
See our guide to the Legend of Zelda timeline to see how it fits into the series.
Platinum Games makes some of the best action games around – that much is all but indisputable. It's approach is unique, and as a result the Switch-exclusive Astral Chain is truly one of a kind in that you're simultaneously controlling not just your character, but also a living weapon tethered to them known as a Legion. This creates a thrilling style of combat that looks spectacular and feels incredible to play around with. Astral Chain is challenging, rewarding, is absolutely jam packed with depth in its combat systems, and has an engaging story as well, with clear inspiration from anime classics such as Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell, and Appleseed, among others.
Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury offers two fantastic Mario experiences that compliment each other brilliantly. 3D World landed on the Wii U and gave fans a unique blend of 2D and 3D platforming, all of which could (optionally) be played with up to four players in a setup that worked better than the New Super Mario series accomplished. Inventive and just plain fun, it was too good of a game to keep stranded on the Wii U forever, and its port to Switch came with bonus online co-op capabilities, a photo mode feature, and more.
But the biggest draw for fans who had already played 3D World was Bowser’s Fury, a brand-new, open-world experience that lasts roughly 3 to 6 hours. Though only a small taste by series standards, this free-form experiment stands as a proof of concept that an open-world Mario game can be just as creative, exhilarating, and enjoyable as what we’ve seen in the franchise thus far. If this is the direction the next mainline Mario goes, it’s an exciting future indeed.
The fine-tuning of Splatoon 3’s team-based multiplayer makes for the series’ best online modes to date, while the introduction of a more fleshed-out single-player campaign elevates it to one of the best overall games available on Switch. The multiplayer is an improvement on Splatoon’s established formula thanks to new weapons, enemies, customization options, and an improved lobby system. The Return of the Mammalians campaign, meanwhile, presents 70 cleverly designed missions, five memorable boss fights, and a soundtrack oozing with style.
Splatoon 3's Side Order DLC is available now.
Other games on this list represent huge innovations and genre shakeups, but Dragon Quest XI S earns its spot because of how classic it feels. This RPG plays like an ode to the 1990s era, and it does an astonishingly good job at taking the classic turn-based format and freshening it up for a modern audience. All the elements you’d expect from a tribute like this are here: Exciting and balanced combat, a nostalgic tale of good against evil, a lovable band of heroes, and a vibrant world to explore.
Every component of Dragon Quest XI S feels meticulously designed and polished, and it's obvious that so much love and care went into crafting this adventure for Dragon Quest’s 30th anniversary. Plus, the Switch version is truly definitive, with additional story content, fully orchestrated music, and the option to swap back and forth between modern 3D graphics and SNES-inspired, top-down pixel art.
Luigi's Mansion 3 is essentially a FrankenLuigistein’s monster of the first two games, a mashup of both that creates the perfect Luigi's Mansion experience. Charming, clever, and absolutely gorgeous to look at, Luigi's Mansion is 17 levels of pure ghost-hunting joy. Working your way through each of the haunted hotels may never extremely challenging, but the creative boss fights and deviously hidden collectibles will keep you busy for a dozen hours or more. The excitement of getting to a new level just to see its theme (TV Studio! Sewer Maze! Egypt!) is well worth the price of admission, plus the game opens with Toad driving a bus. Priceless.
Luigi's Mansion 2 HD releases June 27, 2024.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses takes the series to new heights, deftly blending grueling battles with an expansive social hub that allows for near limitless customization as you recruit, train, and bond with the memorable characters on your team. Its unique take on a three-pronged story ensures that no matter which house you choose, the engrossing plot that unfolds always leaves enough mystery to make multiple playthroughs incredibly hard to resist.
The series' next mainline game, Fire Emblem Engage, is now available on Switch. IGN awarded it a review score of 9 and said Engage "proves itself worthy enough to be counted alongside the legacy it honors so well."
Released on the doorstep of a global pandemic, Animal Crossing: New Horizons provided a much need escape to many, selling nearly 34 million copies to date. Routine and discovery play equally important roles as you plan the perfect layout for your island, make friends (or enemies) with all your villagers, and invite your friends to your own little utopia to trade items and swap secrets.
It’s brilliant in its simplicity and masterful in the way it encourages players to keep up with chores, redecorate and/or reshape entire plots of land, or burn dozens of hours trying to catch rare fish or find every last seasonal item. It certainly helps that all the writing is supremely funny and that, hundreds of hours in, you’re still able to chuckle at a random comment or find genuine inspiration in the places you’d least expect.
Taking a cue from many of Nintendo’s Switch editions of their long-running franchises, Animal Crossing New Horizons does little to completely reinvent the franchise, but it makes a great series even more accessible, more exciting, and more wonderful than it has ever been.
New Horizons is officially Japan's best-selling game of all time. Animal Crossing players can get even more out of it with the Happy Home Paradise DLC. Our reviewer Taylor Lyles called the expansion "a must-have for base game owners."
A masterclass in game design, Metroid Prime is now playable on Switch with a fresh coat of paint and much-needed improvements to its 20-year-old control scheme. As Samus Aran, players follow a distress signal to a Space Pirate frigate where Nintendo’s iconic bounty hunter sets off on a solitary adventure equipped with a growing arsenal of combat and platforming abilities. Metroid Prime Remastered is moody, surprising, inventive, and as IGN’s reviewer Sam Claiborn wrote, “one of the best first-person shooters ever made, full stop.”
Pikmin 4 and its charming creatures – including the new adorable new pup, Oatchi – stick the landing in the strategy-puzzle series' Switch debut. It comes with plenty of new features and upgrades that improve the tried-and-true formula of the first three games, including the largest number of enemies to battle, treasures to collect, and awesome post-game content. It does all of this without its adorable gameplay becoming overcomplicated, making it an ideal starting point to jump in if you've never played before (nothing against the Switch ports of Pikmin 1 and 2 or Pikmin 3 Deluxe), but it's also filled with callbacks to the earlier games for longtime fans.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder proves Nintendo can still hang with the best of them in the 2D platformer category. After nearly two decades of (relatively) bland New Super Mario Bros. games, Nintendo confidently returned to Mario’s roots in Wonder, which lives up to its subtitle thanks to its gorgeously fresh art style, huge amount of clever new enemy types, and inventive Wonder Flower mechanics that constantly surprise and delight by completely turning everything on its head in the middle of a level.
Whether Mario’s marching alongside an army of singing Piranha Plants or desperately trying to survive as a lowly Goomba, Wonder’s creativity and imagination is on full blast from start to finish, resulting in a modern 2D classic that feels like the first worthy heir to Nintendo’s legendary Mario 3 and Mario World. Oh, and Elephant Mario is a pure work of art, too.
Roguelikes don’t always appeal to everyone, but Hades has somehow found a way to win over even those with a distaste for them. Fighting your way out of the Greek underworld is a ruthless and challenging affair, but every failure is rewarded in a way that somehow makes them exciting in their own right.
Instead of just notching up each loss and moving onto the next, the moments between each run push Hades’ excellent storytelling to the forefront, giving you opportunities to learn more about its charming characters and grow close to them – as well as improve the prince of the underworld’s abilities and weapons. It’s that meaningful mix of progression and infinitely repeatable escape attempts (coupled with genuinely fantastic writing, art, and action) that make Hades as delectable as Ambrosia itself.
Hades 2 will enter Early Access exclusively on Steam and Epic Games Store in Q2 2024.
Hollow Knight is one of the best modern MetroidVania’s available, using all the pieces that make the genre so great in the first place without feeling derivative of anything that came before it.
The expertly crafted map that is the kingdom of Hallownest has an absurd amount of paths to explore, bosses to fight, and secrets to uncover. That's all drawn in a somber but expressive art style that gives the adorable bug people who live their lives, and stories, of their own. It can undoubtedly be a challenging and demanding game, but what you get out of will be a reward worth far more than you put in.
The sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, was supposed to be released in the first half of 2023, but Team Cherry delayed it further due to ongoing development.
Metroid Dread had become a near-mythic game, a fabled DS entry that never saw the light of day by the time it was announced at E3 2021 as a Switch game. With nearly 20 years having passed since the last new 2D Metroid, expectations were sky high. Fortunately for fans, Dread met (and in many cases surpassed) expectations for what a modern 2D Metroid game could accomplish.
It’s easily the smoothest game in the series, running at a silky 60fps, and incorporates several new weapons and abilities the series now can’t live without -- the Flash Shift alone makes Dread feel entirely fresh. With high-production values, incredible game design that gently guides the player through ZDR’s labyrinthine corridors, and the most unflinching version of Samus we’ve seen yet, Mercury Steam hit Metroid Dread out of the stratosphere and brought the franchise back into Nintendo’s orbit.
Metroid Prime: Remastered, the upscaled port of the original 2002 Nintendo GameCube title, is available now.
Mario Kart 8’s encore on Nintendo Switch didn’t just keep the online community alive and added returning favorites like Balloon Battle and Bob-omb Blast, we also got a brand-new “cops and robbers” team mode with Renegade Roundup, all of the great DLC stages, and even some guests from the Splatoon universe. It’s not a new game, but one so good, it deserved to reach a bigger audience on Switch right away.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is exactly what its name implies: it’s the ultimate incarnation of Nintendo’s now 20-year-old brawler series. It’s a celebration of Smash Bros. as a whole, filled with more fighters and levels than ever before, and packed to the gills with over 1000 more characters from all across gaming. “Everyone is here!” may have started out as just another tagline, but it’s one that Nintendo has impressively backed up, and it’s made Ultimate the definitive Smash Bros. game for a long time to come. Add a 20+ hour single-player mode with full-on boss fights and huge world maps and it’s easy to get lost in Ultimate. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate had a lot to live up to with that name, but it has undoubtedly done just that.
A masterclass in 3D platforming, Super Mario Odyssey seamlessly blends the best elements from nearly every Mario game with an entire portfolio of new gameplay mechanics to create something both nostalgic and courageous. New players will adore stomping through the vivid and vast new worlds, while seasoned veterans will stick around after the credits to unlock the hundreds of challenges that await their skill and dexterity. To put it succinctly, Super Mario Odyssey is pure, sublime joy and one of the best Super Mario games ever made.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder is available now alongside Super Mario RPG.
Formerly the number one Switch game on the list for years, and for good reason, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been de-throned by Tears of the Kingdom. When Nintendo released Breath of the Wild in 2017, it revolutionized not just Zelda games, but open-world action games at large. The number of Breath of the Wild imitators from all kinds of different developers post-2017 were numerous. While Breath of the Wild is still an essential Switch game, and important to play to fully appreciate Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo’s sequel improves on almost every aspect of Breath of the Wild that it does make going back to the predecessor difficult.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is, hands down, the best game available on Nintendo Switch. Tears of the Kingdom is so good that it arguably made our previous number-one Switch game, Breath of the Wild, obsolete: As IGN’s reviewer Tom Marks wrote, “Breath of the Wild felt far from unfinished but, inconceivably, Tears of the Kingdom has somehow made it feel like a first draft.”
Tears of the Kingdom expands Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule with a larger scale, greater depth, and a more captivating story. It builds on Breath of the Wild’s gameplay with better dungeons, more creative weapon crafting, and unfathomably robust building mechanics. It’s somehow a major improvement on what came before — and what came before was IGN’s pick for the best game of all time.
Tears of the Kingdom won the Best Action/Adventure category at The Game Awards 2023.
Grounded and Planet of Lana arrive on Switch on April 16 and are followed by Tales of Kenzera: Zau and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants on April 23. We then have Another Crab's Treasure to look forward to on April 25 and Braid: Anniversary Edition on April 30.
In May, Endless Ocean Luminous arrives on the 2nd and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door lands on May 23.
These highly rated 2024 games are too new for us to rank yet – we have to let the dust settle – but they and others will be included in the next round of voting the next time we update the list.
April 12, 2024 updates:
Added: Super Mario Wonder, Pikmin 4, Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition, Astral Chain, and Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker.
Did we miss anything? Is your favorite game too low? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to check back when we reconfigure this list again!
