“Snipperclips: Cut it out, together!” Review

With the dearth of titles at the Switch’s launch, Nintendo’s indie-made puzzle game is one of its best titles that deserves attention. What Is It? Snipperclips: Cut it out, together! began life as a game jam game from SFB Games…

With the dearth of titles at the Switch’s launch, Nintendo’s indie-made puzzle game is one of its best titles that deserves attention.

What Is It?

Snipperclips: Cut it out, together! began life as a game jam game from SFB Games called FriendShapes that Nintendo eventually picked up to publish for the Switch as something of a showpiece title.

The core of this game is that you can control up to two characters that are basically U-shaped pieces of paper that can cut each other up to both solve puzzles and cause chaos. There is a bit of platforming required to solve some of those puzzles as you might need to get one character up to a higher platform for whatever role is needed or to just have higher leverage by having one character stand atop the other. The other main mechanic is that you can rotate each character’s U-shaped body with the shoulder buttons, which helps you cut out and create more elaborate shapes out of the other character.

Why Should I Care?

With the Switch’s design emphasizing the ease of local co-op and multiplayer, Snipperclips is a perfect showcase for that with its main two-player co-op modes. That said, everything can be played solo to varying degrees and provides a fun and challenging experience by itself that has its own pros and cons, but the main pro for my own experience was having full control over both characters with no trolls to get in the way. Of course, having a buddy with you means you have two heads to bounce ideas off each other and have half the work to do.

There’s one main mode for up to a couple people that houses 15 levels each over three worlds and a second set of 21 levels in the main co-op mode for two to four people. The third mode is the worst of the bunch with three mediocre competitive mini-games that are nowhere as fun as the main puzzle modes.

The puzzles in Snipperclips do a good job of taking a fairly simple concept and evolving through some cool puzzle design that puzzles those mechanics pretty far. You start off with simple goals like getting a ball to a basketball net or cutting a specific shape out of a sheet of paper to later goals where you need to manipulate liquid or gears to your advantage. The one knock I have for the levels is that the main mode is over as the puzzle design was hitting its stride, but before I felt like they had reached their limits. Switching over to the 2-4 player mode as a solo player was a nice boost in difficulty since you now control four characters across at least two controllers, so swapping between the controllers and characters is challenging in its own right. Not all of those are all that doable solo without a lot of patience and care, which may be too much for a solo player that can maybe handle controlling a character with each hand/controller at once. Of course, these issues don’t really apply with more people, but that’s how much I wanted more content to play as a solo player.

What Makes It Worth My Time And Money?

Snipperclips: Cut it out, together! is a very good puzzle game on the Switch’s eShop that is a perfect showcase of the easy local co-op capabilities of the Switch’s core design. That said, the lack of content and replay value makes it necessary that we get some DLC or Nintendo greenlights a sequel promptly to keep the party going for a bit longer. For now, the game’s style will make it stand out on the Switch during this launch period as a title to get while we wait for more Switch games to be released.