John Walker
The Nintendo Switch certainly feels as though its time is drawing to a close. Six years old this year, it was already a technological generation behind on its release, and there’s no question that it’s increasingly struggling to run the games it’s hosting. Despite all this, and even with the rise of the Steam Deck, there’s nothing else out there quite like it. It still feels like an essential device, and 2023 provides all manner of reasons why you’ll want to keep yours charged and ready.
Like so many Nintendo handhelds and consoles before it, the Switch feels unique in a cross-platform market, with its peculiar ability to be both a handheld and a console contributing largely toward this. But it’s also because there’s a sort of game that just feels right on a Nintendo device, difficult to sensibly delineate, but we all know it when we see it. And 2023 turns out to already be packed with such games.
Who knows what surprises Nintendo might have up their sleeves for 2023—it’s the sort of bizarro company which will announce and release a major entry into a beloved franchise with about ten minutes’ notice—and there’s every chance that we could be learning of a follow-up console as soon as we see Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in May. But below is a collection of games we do know are coming this year, or at least have very good reasons to expect. And no, we did not bother listing Metroid Prime 4.
For the avoidance of confusion, this is certainly not an exhaustive list of forthcoming Switch games, but rather a selected few we think could be worth looking forward to. Also, this list is deliberately console exclusive, which is to say, games released either exclusively on the Switch, or only on Switch and PC.