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

One of our most anticipated indie games heading into the final few weeks of the year is The Touryst from Fast RMX developer Shin’en Games. First revealed during Nintendo’s Indie World presentation back in August, the game looked absolutely gorgeous.

This impression was confirmed during our hands-on with the game at Gamescom, where we described it as a ton of fun, and were incredibly impressed with the way the game looked.

Now, in an interview with Nintendo Life ahead of the game’s 21 November launch, the developer has confirmed that those striking visuals are down to squeezing the very best performance out of the Switch.

“In docked mode we render in up to 1080p and 720p for mobile mode. And of course we always keep the game at steady 60fps. This was important to us because the game feels and looks so much better at a constant high framerate. It was not easy to get everything into a 60fps budget.
We had to multi-thread much more of our code base and create many new post-processing effects that looked gorgeous while still performing fast enough. However, as we are working since 2016 with the Switch we already had a quite solid technical foundation we were able to build on.”

It’s an interesting feature, Nintendo were apparently very keen on an early test of the diorama-esque environments ahead of the Switch’s launch too.

The game sees you as a mustachioed holidaymaker that gets pulled into solving the mystery of the islands he’s visiting. There’s no combat, but plenty of puzzles to solve and interesting locations to explore. We certainly got massive Captain Toad vibes from the game back at Gamescom, but with the added ability to jump.

It’s great to see indie developers pushing the Switch to the max. The Touryst certainly looks impressive, here’s hoping it’s just as much fun to play when it launches next week.

Are you looking forward to this one? Let us know down in the comments.

Source: Nintendo Life