This feature was originally written for TheNintendoVillage.com, a website I founded and ran from 2018 to 2021.

In amongst the big boys’ booths at EGX there’s always a healthy selection of indie games for press and attendees to get to grips with. There’s also a dedicated Rezzed section for indie developers, and Nintendo themselves are often pretty good at dedicating a portion of their booth to some of the smaller developers bringing games to Switch.

Needless to say, once we’d finished with Luigi’s Mansion 3 and Ring Fit Adventure, we dove straight into these smaller titles and found a fair few gems! So here’s our pick of the indie games coming to Switch that you need to keep an eye on.

Cake Bash

Have you ever wanted to see a French fancy slap a donut? Because Cake Bash - from developer High Tea Frog - makes this a reality. A 4 player party game (or should that be pastry game?) that see’s you and several friends fight for points in a series of ridiculous mini-games.

The Nintendo Village team had some frosted fun while playing games involving collecting jelly beans, avoiding giant pigeons and even pushing others onto a burning hob.

While the actual player cakes are realistically rendered, cartoon eyes and limbs are attached and that weird juxtaposition with the cartoon violence is what brings most of the comedy.

Very few mini games genuinely need players to attack each other, but when you put a slap button in a game then you’d better be sure that people will use it. The mini-games we played all had a decent amount of fun involved, nothing too serious, and the ability to constantly fight made it all the more funny throughout.

Perhaps it was the result of being an early build, but it was hard to get a sense of skill from anything. While most people play party games purely to annoy friends, sometimes it is nice to feel a bit more control over what’s needed to emerge victorious, so hopefully the final release can refine this. It would also be great to see some tournaments, or at least something to bring the mini-games together into a cohesive structure.

For now though, Cake Bash is a blast to play with friends as well as a visual treat, unsurprising given that a few heads on the dev team are Ubisoft alumni. We can’t wait to see what else is built up around this raucous recipe when the game comes to Switch and other platforms later next year.

Locomotion

This charming little puzzler was originally in development for PC but has happily now been announced for Switch.

The object of the game is to get your train from its starting position to the goal, and in order to do so, there’s various switches and portals and lifts that you have to activate. It’s one of those games that is relatively straightforward to find the goal, but if you want to pick up all three gold pieces on each level, you’re going to have to use your brain.

Funnily enough, the team at Polyfox didn’t have time to put together a demo of the Switch version for EGX, so the build on the showfloor was actually the full game. I had to stop myself from spending several hours sat there playing through the entire thing it was that addictive.

Definitely one for the Captain Toad fans out there. I really enjoyed the challenge and the puzzles on offer (one latter stage really had me scratching my head) so the sooner this arrives on Switch the better!

A little extra polish is apparently needed, so expect it some time early next year.

Moving Out

Team17’s latest, Moving Out, is a chaotic co-op title that sees you and up to three other friends put in charge of removals for a series of weird and wonderful houses. Developed by SMG Studio, each level gives you a laundry list of items that are destined for the back of the van, and it’s up to you and your friends to work together to grab them all before the timer is up.

While early items are fairly simple to pick up and place where they need to go, later levels involve haunted houses with floating furniture, or a barnyard where you have to pack up the livestock. We can only assume that the mayhem continues as you work your way through the game.

There’s no points for squabbling, and many items require a few hands to be picked up, along with some coordination to traverse through the house and eventually into the removal van.

But if you can play with friends, you can fight with friends, and the option to slap was used without caution or hesitation. The already chaotic gameplay quickly became a slap fight, which paired with the game’s weird playable characters and their bouncing physics, became an absolute joy to watch. As characters move further away and the map zooms out, each player gets surrounded in their assigned colour with a pointer clearly showing where they are, so even at it’s most frantic the game never makes it difficult to see where you are or what you are doing.

Moving Out takes seconds to understand, even between four of you, and we immediately found ourselves in fits of laughter while hauling haunted sofas or organising a group removal of a particularly difficult cow. The simple control scheme and clear concept mean this is going to be an absolute blast for family occasions, we just hope the variety and hilarity is just as abundant the whole way through.

PHOGS!

Bit Loom Games’ PHOGS! has two players control either end of a two headed dog that can crawl on it’s belly, hold onto objects and stretch to reach things further away. You never break the tether between you, but in a similar way to Snake Pass, you can anchor one player on an object while the other flails wildly around.

The loose physics and stupid expressions on the dogs faces makes almost everything you do comedy gold, especially as you shout at your co-op partner to grab a torch or alarm bell to solve the puzzles presented to you.

We were quickly getting caught on things, dropping important objects and failing to drag things across a level with hilarious results.

While some games with this sort of loose control scheme can feel inaccurate to the point of frustration, PHOGS! masters a line between agency and comedy that never becomes tedious.

The pastel colours and storybook aesthetic all also added wonderfully to the game’s personality, while some puzzles took a few head-scratching moments to solve - giving a nice ‘eureka’ moment when the solution finally came into view.

Slated for a tentative ‘Early 2020’ release, we can’t wait to share this weird, hilarious adventure with loved ones in the future.

Röki

Röki was a pleasant surprise to say the least. It’s instantly charming thanks to its sharp, colourful and simplistic art style. Taking place within a Scandinavian folklore setting, Röki brings a new approach to the classic point and click adventure genre.

The dark fairytale creatures that inhabit the land are not all as they seem. Some are friendly and in need of a hand, such as a troll resting under the bridge who has a sword wedged in his shoulder.

Playing as the young girl Trove, you progress through the world by helping out creatures using your brains and wit to solve these puzzles. For example, you’ll need to fashion a device to pull the sword from the troll using a combination of a bear trap and rope to grip and yank it from his shoulder.

Röki is definitely a game to look out for, especially those who adore games such as Monkey Island and Broken Sword. I really enjoyed my brief time with the game, the calm atmosphere and beautifully crafted landscape left me with a strong sense of wonder, and a growing attachment to the world in which it’s set.

Unto The End

Outside of Luigi’s Mansion 3, this was arguably my favourite game I played at EGX this year. A 2D action adventure developed by a husband and wife team (by the name of 2Ton Studios) built around a unique combat mechanic.

Pushing the left stick up or down allows you to block and parry attacks from the monsters and baddies that populate the bleak world you inhabit. I quickly learned that it’s important to react to your foes, rather than trying to anticipate them, lest you get beaten to a bloody pulp. Once I’d learned some patience though, everything clicked and it felt absolutely fantastic.

I honestly don’t think I’ve ever played a 2D adventure game with such an involved combat mechanic before, but it works spectacularly well. Whisper it, but there’s definitely a Dark Souls-esque vibe to it, albeit on a flatter plane.

I’m looking forward to seeing what else the world has in store - it will be interesting to see if there are interesting puzzles to solve as you move through it - but the combat is tight and fluid enough to propel this one straight to the top of my watch list.

WindJammers 2

WindJammers 2 sees a beautiful coat of paint added to the frantic disk throwing, frisbee game.

Fans of the classic WindJammers will feel right at home as WindJammers 2 loses none of the strategic arcade feel of the original, instead opting to improve on those solid foundations.

New power moves, levels and characters have been added as well as enhanced multiplayer modes. After a few 1 on 1 local matches, its very clear that WindJammers 2 may be the easy to grasp, hard to master multiplayer game that causes friendly rivalry in the best possible way.

Did I mention how beautiful the new hand drawn style is? It truly is the icing on the cake to an already fantastic game.