The process

Conducted in May/June 2025

We set out to make this, roughly timed with the release of the Switch 2, to look back at our favorite games from a console that, it became apparent fairly quickly after launch, would go on to be a fantastic one for the kinds of games we love to play.

Ranking methodology

Casey solicited ordered lists of people's favorite games from the Switch. You were allowed to submit a list with 20 or fewer games. Your highest-ranked game would receive 20 points, second-highest 19 points, and so on. After that, games were placed in order of points received. The list will be published with 2 new ranks per day (which will mean that, in case of a tie, more than 2 games might be listed), starting with #20 and #19 and proceeding down to #1, archived in full on this website.

Big Tent

Few boundaries were placed on what was allowed on the lists: the guideline we came up with was that if you can have the game as an icon on your Switch OS's "All Software" screen, you're allowed to include it, whether it came out on Switch first or not, or even if you did't play it on Switch. Some people chose to limit their individual lists to only games they played there, but it wasn't a requirement.

Participation

9 people submitted lists for consideration. Across those, 111 different games were present, with 84 of them existing only on one person's list. Despite that broad diversity in games that the group values, there was a cluster of games that emerged at the top of the scoreboard that feels like a fairly definitive collection.

The List

in an old-timey cartoon scene, two anthropomorphic cups pilot planes to confront a giant medusa who rises out of an ocean scene

17. (tie) Cuphead

"What if Spooky Scary Skeletons was a whole video game" and other such questions

hal knight, protagonist of hollow knight, walks through a subterranean garden towards what looks like hr giger designed an information booth at a zoo

7. Hollow Knight

we'll never know what this would have ranked if silksong had come out on switch

But Wait... There's More

Presenting...

As noted above, there were so many games submitted, and in many ways it's very nice that our scoring system made 20 ranks' worth of games so clearly worth making into a definitive list, but it seems a shame to see so many games go unheralded.

And Thus

In looking through each individual list, Casey noticed that everyone's list had at least one game that no one else ranked. The Outliers came out of the process of finding the highest-ranked game on each person's list that no one else ranked in their top 20, then asking that person to write a short pitch for the game.

Order

The order presented below is ranked by comparing the relative placement of the chosen game within the list of the person that chose it, starting with the lowest placement and ending with the highest placement (which, this time, happened to be a #1 ranking!)

Collect them all!

Take a look through this list and see if maybe there are some that you missed! Give them a chance and see what you think.

The Outliers