After Bomberman R, of course
It was easy to miss the booth for Snipperclips: Cut it Out, Together at Sunday’s Switch Preview Tour event in San Francisco. It was just one table, and to its right was a Mario Odyssey video screen while to its left was the line for Arms. I’m a bit peeved I didn’t get a chance to play Arms, but I would have given it up for the opportunity to play Snipperclips a second time.
Snipperclips: Cut it Out, Together is a co-op puzzle game that has each player using one of the Joy-Con as they work together to figure out each solution. The gimmick here is the snip feature. With a press of a button, you can cut away at your bullet-shaped partner. To do this, simply overlap your body with the part of theirs you want to cut and then snip away like you’re at a bris.
The mechanic is stupidly simple and so much fun. At the event, I tried the demo out with a Switch staff member, who promptly cut away my entire body. It was funny, and with the press of a button, I was back and able to do the same thing to her. Within seconds of picking up our Joy-Con controllers, we were both in fits of laughter.
The demo was timed, so after our little cutting party, we had to get to work. She recommended we communicate verbally to solve these puzzles, but then realized early on I knew what I was doing. The first puzzle, requiring us to cut each other into a specific shape to fill an outline, was over in a jiff. From there, we had to sharpen pencils, place a tire on a car, shoot basketballs, and more. The demo only featured two-player puzzles, but the title will support up to four players at once.
In the 10 minutes I spent with her, staring at the Switch screen in Tabletop mode as we both cut each other to pieces, the puzzle solutions didn’t repeat and with non-verbal clues, we were able to work together successfully. Snipperclips is a very minimalistic game, with no instructions on what to do, and that may be my favorite thing about it. The demo gave us no guidance on how to proceed. We simply had to look at the stage and figure it out.
The solutions I came across were never obscure, but I can’t say enough about how gratifying it is to solve a puzzle with someone I just met without some notification beforehand telling us what we have to do to progress, even if the solution is so easy a caveman could do it. It absolutely elevated my experience with the game and I hope to God Snipperclips developer SFB Games doesn’t include those types of hints in the final product.