After the relative grounding out of the Wii U console (RIP, you beautiful, strange beast), Nintendo hit an absolute home run with their latest console: The Switch. Released in 2017, the Nintendo Switch represents a sharpened, effective peak of Nintendo's constant experimentation with their controllers. The console itself is a controller. You can dock it into your television and play it big and loud. Or, you can "switch" it to a handheld console, and play it wherever the heck you want. The experiment worked and then some; it routinely tops best-selling console lists, has delivered countless viral and acclaimed titles, and continues to provide joys of playing full-ass games however you want.

If you're looking the best of the best games to play on your Switch, look no further. We've rounded up the 25 best games you can play on the system, with an attempt to provide a broad swath of genres, tones, and vibes. These games represent just how much power and variety Nintendo's latest system possesses, and makes us excited for the Switch's future.

Grab an alive hat and take a deep breath of the wild: Here are the 25 best Nintendo Switch games.

(Oh, before we officially start, pour one out for these honorable mentions: ARMSBayonetta 2Brothers: A Tale of Two SonsDonkey Kong Country: Tropical FreezeThe Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimGuacamelee!The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, Luigi’s Mansion 3, New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, Night in the Woods, Octopath Traveler, Ōkami, Ori and the Blind ForestPokémon Sword and Shield, Thimbleweed Park, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Yoshi's Crafted World.)

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

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Image via Nintendo

It's just nice. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the Switch continuation of the franchise that began on GameCube in 2002, lets you create a custom player, a custom island, and an environment to go hang out on other people's islands. And that's... kinda it? You can do things to earn bells, the currency of the Animal Crossing world, do your best to make Tom Nook happy, haggle over turnip prices, listen to dope music from Isabelle and K.K. Slider, and create social environments for very chill online hangs. It's low-stakes, low-stress, high-reward, the perfect emotional antidote to the very troubling times the game was released during. Sing it with me: Meep mop meep mope mwamp mwope!

Celeste

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Image via Matt Makes Games

Celeste is a special kind of game, one that honors both Nintendo's past while opening the doors to all kinds of emotional futures. It's a 2D platformer with the aesthetics of an SNES classic and the streamlined gameplay of a contemporary wonder. You play as Madeline, a young adventurer determined to climb Celeste Mountain. Along the way, she climbs, she jumps, she traverses obstacles, and she reflects upon her own burning doubts and mental health struggles. Wait, what? Yep, buried in the center of this simple-looking game is a complicated, sorrowful, and ultimately hopeful examination of what it means to be a fulfilled human being. One sequence features a literal panic attack, and the purity of the retro graphics coupled with the comfort and care the recipient receives in that moment is something that will sit in my video game heart for years to come.

Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics

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Image via Nintendo

Call me old fashioned, but I think it's dope that we have 51 of the best and most fundamental games ever made available at our fingertips in the form of Nintendo Switch. Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics is a thorough, charming compendium of some of our greatest games with the most staying power, in honor of Nintendo's beginnings as a playing card company. You've got chess, Texas hold 'em, mancala, connect four, Mahjong, and so many others — all rendered simply and invitingly, especially the sound design's wonderful mix of sneakily funky tunes and tactile sound effects. There will undoubtedly be games you have not heard of in this mix (I for one can not stop playing President), and you will undoubtedly have fun playing against randos online, friends online, friends in your own home on the same Switch, and even by yourself. They're classics for a reason!

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

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Image via Nintendo

A deep JRPG with lots of appealingly difficult player choices, beautiful anime aesthetics, and a robust combat system, Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a home run for the Switch player who tried Pokémon Sword and Shield and decided they needed something more. If you only know Fire Emblem characters through their ubiquity in the Super Smash Bros. franchise, Three Houses is an ideal starting point, giving you a sense of the franchise's deep mythology while also setting you well ahead into its future. There are, as you might guess, three houses your character Byleth can support in an ongoing conflict. Depending on which side you choose, you will go through different narratives, turn-based battles will have different contexts, and new to the franchise, your life-simulating sequences will have different actions and consequences. Fire Emblem: Three Houses makes you literally go back to school among its JRPG-plotting and battling, and you will love it, and you will have to replay it at least twice to try the other houses.

Golf Story

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Image via Sidebar Games

I’ve got a big sweet tooth. And one of my favorite flavor profiles vis-a-vis sweets is dark chocolate mixed with orange. Ooh, just thinking about it makes me salivate. I think it’s the combination of light and bright flavor profiles combined with a more mature, literally darker flavor profile, the oppositional nature of both providing the perfect base reality for the other to pop. Golf Story is the dark chocolate and orange of RPGs. Its tone is very, very silly and very, very wholesome (orange!), but at its core is fundamentally sound, deep, satisfying gameplay (dark chocolate!). As the title implies, the game’s about golf. You play an aspirational golfer, a wouldbe Tiger who must play his way through some of the fiercest and silliest links to win a tournament and become a golf champion. But even if you don’t like golf, Golf Story is a worthy play. Sidebar Games has a deliciously English-feeling sense of humor in their club bag, with nearly every interaction your character has resulting in smartly silly laughter. But they also have tons and tons of heart, giving the oft open-world feeling narrative a sincere, emotional resolution. Golf Story goes down like candy in the best way possible, a piece of confection that won’t give you a toothache.

Inside

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Image via Playdead

Goodness gracious, Inside is gonna put you through the emotional ringer. Indie publishing wonder-team Playdead took the playbook from their previous cult classic Limbo and heightened every inch of it, resulting in an immersive, simple-but-complicated, utterly devastating title. In a series of beautifully harrowing 2.5D post-apocalyptic cityscapes, your unnamed character will traverse platforming puzzles, avoid vindictive guards, and come across some surreally haunting sights — all while occasionally taking control of other entities' minds in your quest. Its conclusions are purposefully ambiguous but nonetheless devastating; Playdead is playing with ideas of agency, control, and what it means to be merciful and kind even at your own cost, both on a general "life experience" scale and a micro/meta "this actual game you're currently playing" scale. Take some time to, like, take a long walk after you finish Inside.

L.A. Noire

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Image via Rockstar Games

L.A. Noire is a touch of an acquired taste, but for those who are in love with its thorough-yet-wonky hardboiled charms, it makes a more than worthy addition to the Switch, transplanting that wonderful Rockstar "immersive story-driven yet open world" energy into the palm of your hand with not too many kinks. You play Detective Cole Phelps (Aaron Staton doing some lovely mocap performing), a World War II vet-turned-cop who dives deep into the seedy underbelly of post-war Los Angeles, solving cases that get into the corruption of Hollywood, the prominence of drugs, and even the Black Dahlia Murder. There's lots of fun components to the gameplay, from the uniqueness of examining crime scenes to interrogating perps based on evidence and facial tells (usually not terribly subtle), to the standard pleasures of driving around and shooting at baddies. Presentation-wise, it just feels like 1940s LA; every car, street sign, costume, and radio attuned exactly to what we love about this zone of crime fiction. And storywise, there are a number of wild twists and amoral turns to uncover and unpack. By the end, you will feel queasy about playing Cole, and if you're a ginormous noir fan like me, all of this is catnip of the purest form. If you're not, this is still the closest to a Red Dead or GTA you have on the Switch so far, and it'll scratch that itch while giving you new stuff, too.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

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Image via Nintendo

Playing a Legend of Zelda game has always been a comforting experience for me, my familiarity with the long-running franchise's gameplay, tone, structure, music, and characters feeling like a warm bath. But Breath of the Wild is intent on blowing up nearly all of these things I've found so set in stone and so comfortable, creating a brand new world of adventure and, yes, comfort in its wake. It's an open-world adventure, with nooks, crannies, and gorgeous open spaces worthy of both aimless exploration and intentional choice (it's just that sometimes your choice is "sword fight a monster" and sometimes it's "fish for awhile"). Its sound design is much more sparse than any previous Zelda game; I am a huge fan of the pervasive music in the DNA of every previous Zelda game, and it took some time for me to get used to tunes only showing up at certain moments of action. But once I did, I realized how newly emotionally immersive this technique was, playing perfectly with the rest of the game's newfound levels of invitation to the player. It's no longer a comfort, it's a genuine call to new adventure. And what's more Zelda than that?

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle

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Image via Ubisoft

How on earth does Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle work? The inexplicable crossover between the Mario universe and the Rayman/Rabbids universe isn’t founded on either of those family-friendly games’ platforming. No, instead, Ubisoft and Nintendo want you to use these cuddly, silly characters to shoot the hell out of each other in tactical turn-based combat that feels less like Nintendo and more like XCOM! Somehow, some way, it works phenomenally well. The gameplay is rich and deep, the combat never gets old, the sense of humor is so surreal, so loopy, and packs some bite, too. Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is that gourmet sandwich that sounds strange when you read the ingredients apart, but tastes like heaven when you bite in.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

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Image via Nintendo

Simply put: If you own a Switch and don't own Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, you're doing something wrong. It's a smooth, accessible, endlessly replayable take on the kart-racing, item-chucking, Luigi-death-staring franchise. It's stuffed with tons of characters, awesome karts and cycles with noticeably changing stats, incredibly inventive tracks, and conduits for multiplayer laughs and action, either online or on the couch. Plus, if you only played the original Mario Kart 8 for Wii U (remember Wii U?), you're in for a treat, as every subtle component of the game has been finely tuned into the most easily-playable version of Mario Kart thus far. It may not be the absolute best of the franchise (that would be Mario Kart: Double Dash, no further questions), but Mario Kart 8 Deluxe might be the absolute best multiplayer Switch game.

Rayman Legends

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Image via Ubisoft

I don't think there is a single more inventive, chaotic, imaginative, restless, and purely fun 2D platformer on the Nintendo Switch than Rayman Legends — and that includes the damn 2D Mario platformer available on Nintendo Switch. Playing as either Rayman, several creatures within the Rayman universe, or any of these creatures dressed as Mario universe characters (my favorite), you run, climb, wall-jump, punch, grab onto vines, and even move in perfect time to music across a series of immaculately designed levels. The curve of difficulty in Rayman Legends is sloped perfectly, starting simple and intuitive before ratcheting up in intensity without you even noticing. It feels great to finish some of these later levels, and it feels greater to have it all go down with the delightful sense of humor, exquisite production design, and catchy-as-hell tunes rampant throughout the deep, dense title. Play it multiplayer and let the chaos reign!

Rocket League

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Image via Psyonix

Rocket League has been around for five years, available on every console, its bonkers soccer/drag-racing cross-play shenanigans by now a given for most gamers. And I am here to tell you the Nintendo Switch is the definitive way to play it. If you haven't, you must — The online multiplayer game puts you behind the wheel of a fierce, fast car against other fierce, fast cars in a game of soccer. Yep. Cars playing soccer. What a world, what a game! And a perfect online multiplayer game it is, the unique idea paying off in spades. Its difficulty curve is just so that casual players and hardcore strategists alike will kind of always "do the same." I laugh -- hard -- at the goals I manage to score, or the near-misses I rocket-zoom past, or the SUV that just literally made me explode right as I was about to make a pass. It's an alchemy of video game magic, one with quite the fanbase and replayability factor. Having it on the Switch is beyond wonderful, but be warned — You will stay up way too late playing just one more game in bed, and you will toss the entire Switch console onto the surface of your bed in joyful frustration.

Shovel Knight

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Image via Yacht Club Games

If you're gonna play a Nintendo console, you might as well play games lovingly inspired by previous Nintendo consoles. Shovel Knight is a reverent tribute to and expansion of classic NES adventures, a 2D action-platformer with beautiful, lushly retro levels and a hero who bops enemies and finds treasure using, yes, his trusty shovel. In dialogue with the Mega Man franchise before it, there are now tons of delightful expansion packs and DLC content available under one delicious Switch umbrella, featuring different Knights with different skills and powers, including Shield Knight, Tinker Knight, and my personal favorite, Plague Knight (love an 8-bit plague mask). Even within the technical limitations of the 8-bit graphical aesthetics of the title (in fact, it might be because of), the Shovel Knight saga is full of emotional potency beyond its fun, nostalgic gameplay, including a dance sequence that sincerely makes me happy every time I think about it. Get yourself some Mountain Dew and pizza (or whatever nostalgic gamer fuel you need), and dive into a rich world of past and future.

Songbird Symphony

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Image via PQube Limited

Has a video game ever made you cry? I’ve heard of folks losing it in scenes from big titles Final Fantasy, Shadow of the Colossus, and Mass Effect. But for me, it took an indie platformer about a bird trying to find himself, all set ingeniously to exquisite music, to let those waterworks fly. Songbird Symphony is about Birb, a young orphaned bird trying to find out where he came from. To do so, he jumps and bobs and flies across various areas of the jungle, interacting wonderfully with his fellow animals along the way. And all of it, sometimes subtly and sometimes explicitly and always masterfully, is synced in perfect time to beautiful, charming music. Like a Mario, the sound effects are harmonically in tune with the background music, but Songbird Symphony takes it one movement further. The arrangement doesn’t fully flesh out until you perform certain goals and tasks, giving each level a constant sense of discovery and evolution, not unlike the way band members walked out one at a time in Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. All of this beautiful music in service of a beautiful, primal story? My tears, they are a-flowing.

Sonic Mania

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Image via Sega

A fierce, ingenious, rollicking, and refreshingly difficult in a long-running franchise that put new life into it by listening, as directly as possible, to its fans. Sonic Mania is a rapturous game for Sonic the Hedgehog fans, a literal sprint through familiar worlds (hearing the Green Hill Zone theme song just makes me smile) and then, to thrilling effect, remixed versions of these familiar worlds. This remix structure comes from a development team of fans who cut their teeth making fan games and ROM hacks of original Sonic source codes, and I give all of my kudos to Sega for letting these enthusiastic folks have their way with the material with an official seal of approval. You can feel a sense of genuine love, of fun, of pure invention in these levels — and if you think there's nothing new you can add to the set-in-stone formula of 2D Sonic games, you haven't experienced this Mania yet.

Splatoon 2

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Image via Nintendo

You're not really gonna find a typical shooter on a Nintendo Switch console. But you are gonna find a very Nintendo-ified shooter, and isn't that more fun? Splatoon 2 is a third-person shooter with a vast multiplayer community and familiar-feeling modes to blast each other during. But you're not gonna find your typical assault rifles and military industrial complex-deifying aesthetics. Instead, you play as either an Inkling or an Octoling, and you blast forms of colored ink at each other using various wacky weapons and tech (and even turning briefly into squid-like creatures to swim through ink). Quantity is the name of the game — while the various multiplayer modes differ in specific, inventive rules, it tends to boil down to covering as much of the turf (and each other) with your own colored ink. And with its bright aesthetics, irreverently charming design, and catchy music, Splatoon 2 always feels easy and invigorating to return to.

Stardew Valley

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Image via ConcernedApe

How long can you play an open-ended game like Stardew Valley? Well, how much time and dedication do you have? This delightful “real life simulator” that’s got quite a bit in common with games like Animal Crossing and My Time at Portia sees the player taking over their grandfather’s farm and getting in the good graces of the local townsfolk. You can do all of that and get to endgame status in about 52 hours. But this farming, crafting, fighting, and romancing sim is so pure and wonderful that you may find yourself sticking around long after the main campaign is done, just because you can.

You have only to look online to see the impressive farms (and fiefdoms, really) that players have put together since the game’s 2016 release. One-person creator ConcernedApe has long been keeping up with both the community and the game’s patches and updates, giving continuing players more and more new material to work with. A big bonus in this game is the ability to co-op farm so that you can spend time collaborating with fellow players rather than trying to take it all on your own shoulders. That leads to some truly incredible layouts, efficiencies of production, and vast quantities of resources produced … but for many people, the high replay value lies in the relationships between your character and the citizens of the nearby town. With a variety of romance options, narrative arcs, and drastically different outcomes, the “visual novel” folks will want to pick up Stardew Valley again and again.

Whether you’ve always wanted to run your own farm, battle through endless mines and caves full of monsters, or just romance the ever-loving heart out of a diverse cast of characters (all while chilling out to some incredible music tracks), Stardew Valley is the videogame home away from home for you. – Dave Trumbore

Streets of Rage 4

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Image via Dotemu

Playing Streets of Rage 4 feels good. Cathartic, even. A long-awaited sequel to the classic Sega side-scrolling beat-em-up franchise, SoR4 boasts beautiful 2D animation, exquisitely funky tunes, wild takes on familiar favorites (Axel lookin' beefy), and a revamped combat system with subtle, immersive differences and tweaks. It's an out-and-out smash to play, a more grown-up, gritty, viscerally bone-crunching game that honors the joy of the franchise while also heightening its already present "rebel against the dystopian police state and take back the streets!" themes (hmm, wonder why it feels so cathartic right now). It is exactly how neo-retro games should be designed — iit does feature nostalgia-inducing classic music and character sprites, but you owe it to yourself to play through it with all the new stuff first. Dotemu has delivered a pleasing cavalcade of carnage, a John Wick of video games. You'll devour it.

Super Mario Maker 2

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Image via Nintendo

I love how much Nintendo, as a brand, caters directly to its players' creative imaginations. The Switch has spoken directly to the idea of "players creating" before, with the mixed bag of the Nintendo Labo experiment, but Super Mario Maker 2 represents a streamlined, addictive, fascinating take on the collusion between player and creator. As the title suggests, the game gives you all kinds of tools to create your own Mario levels, borrowing tons of mechanics and aesthetics from tons of Mario games, including Super Mario WorldSuper Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario 3D World. It's mind-bendingly fun work to create these levels and worlds, and it's a whole 'nother set of chaotic joy to jump into the active SMM2 online community and start playing these suckers. Different styles and strategies abound; some try their damnedest to create genuine Mario levels, some sadists make the hardest ones they can, some (my favorites) create levels in which all you literally have to do is hold forward to win while nonsense happens around you. In effect, Super Mario Maker 2 becomes a perpetual motion machine of Mario games. There's always new flagpoles to jump onto.

Super Mario Odyssey

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Image via Nintendo

Goodness, what an experience of utter joy. Super Mario Odyssey is the first (and hopefully not last!) new, solo Mario adventure for the Switch, giving it a ton of expectations and pressures to be great. It lofts over those expectations handily, with wonderful new control schemes (Cappy for life!), level designs, music orchestrations, and several "songs with lyrics" reveals that made me smile so hard my cheeks hurt. Playing a bit like Super Mario 64 meets Breath of the WildOdyssey has an open-world flair and flavor, while still giving everyone's favorite plumber a clear goal to collect moons and save that damn princess. The aforementioned Cappy, a sentient, alive hat with googly eyes (hell yeah) is used in every facet of Mario's movement, combat, and even possession of other creatures to dazzlingly imaginative effect. It's restless, joyful, pure, unadulterated fun, and there is one sequence that literally made me weep it filled me with such happiness. I'm sure you'll find a completely separate one.