Games

50 Best Nintendo Switch Games To Play Right Now (2024)

March 1, 2024

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Nintendo Life

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Welcome to our master list of the top 50 best games ever released on Nintendo Switch, as ranked by you. As the Switch enters its eighth year on 3rd March 2024 — yes, it launched a full seven years ago! — we’re republishing this reader-ranked list of the top 50 absolute best games on the system.

As you can see, it offers a clear answer to the question ‘Which is best, BOTW or TOTK?’ Enjoy!

Nintendo Switch has amassed a huge amount of great games since the console launched back in 2017. Of course, this abundance of riches leaves us in something of a pickle — too much software, not enough time to play it all. In fairness, it’s a lovely problem to have. Help! There are too many excellent games to choose from!

But what are the best games for Nintendo Switch? Which Switch games are must-haves? What should I play first on Switch?

Well, we asked Nintendo Life readers to rate the top Nintendo Switch games since launch — the very best Switch games to play right now — and the list below is the result. As with our round-ups of the 50 Best Games from various consoles, years and series, the ranking is governed by each title’s User Rating in Nintendo Life’s games database and is subject to real-time change. This means our Best Switch Games list will always include new games as they are released.

If you’ve yet to score your favourites, simply click on each game’s rating below to score it from 1-10. A game needs a minimum of 50 ratings to become eligible, so it’s entirely possible to influence the best Switch games ranking below and get your favourites on the list.

Can’t see your favourite? If the game you want to rate isn’t in the top 50, feel free to find it using the search tool below and give it a score out of 10. If it’s bubbling under, it could very well pop into the ranking below.

Without further ado, let’s dive into this selection of the very best Nintendo Switch games you can play right now…

This beautiful Switch remake of the classic Game Boy entry rebuilt everything from the ground up. On top of the beautiful new art style, it added modern conveniences, a dungeon creator, amiibo support, and lots of little quality-of-life improvements whilst infusing every single square inch of Koholint – every secret passage, Piranha, Pokey, and Pig Warrior – with a level of detail and depth that totally reinvigorated both its timeless story and classic Zelda gameplay for a new generation.

If there’s anything holding The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening back, some frame rate issues might prove jarring for some players. Others may not even notice, but if you’re sensitive to dropped frames, you may be distracted from the otherwise absorbing gameplay. It’s a little thing, but with the heritage of technical wizardry behind the Game Boy original, it is a small dent in this game’s otherwise glistening armour.

A Short Hike is a fat-free experience from top to bottom – or should we say bottom to top? It’s the kind of game that makes us just sigh with happiness when we recall our time with it, and even having played it through to its ostensible conclusion multiple times, we know for a fact there are still things to see and do on that mountain. What we have here is something of an apotheosis – a milestone in indie games akin to Cave Story, or Spelunky. The very best bits of multiple game genres, stripped of all padding and bloat, mixed perfectly into a delicious video game stew that only gets richer and richer the more you play. An exploration in every sense of the word, A Short Hike is cute without being twee, challenging without being obnoxious, and emotional without being cloying. A landmark game for all ages. Don’t miss this one.