A year ago, the Nintendo Switch looked like a Hail Mary from a legacy game company that desperately needed a win. A hybrid machine—part living-room console, part handheld— that turned the Wii U’s kinda-portability into a success? Well, it could work...maybe.
Now, of course, the Switch feels like an inevitability. It has already outsold the lifetime sales of the Wii U, and is on pace to match up with the runaway, culture-redefining success of the Wii. Nintendo's latest console was a juggernaut in its first year, largely by becoming precisely what many analysts (including me) suggested it needed to be: a system that buoyed a series of excellent first-party titles with a healthy diet of indie games and ports. Which raises the question: where does Nintendo go from here?
The answer? More games like Celeste.
Celeste, out this week simultaneously on PlayStation 4, PC, and the Nintendo Switch, is a retro-styled 2D platformer about climbing mountain ruins. It's also more than that: it's a lush, warm story of a girl challenging herself and winning. It's one of the best feeling, and best sounding platformers I've played in a long time, invigorating and clever. Each screen is a small puzzle of acrobatic routing, offering easy and difficult paths through the environment, allowing the player to challenge herself or just move on.
Celeste is one of those games that's difficult to describe because it just feels… right; every part of it works together to provide an experience that's light and satisfying. It's also—and this is the important detail to note for Nintendo's sake—new. A new indie game, from Matt Thorson, creator of the wildly successful Towerfall, released simultaneously on Switch and other platforms.
See, the early strategy of the Switch, while successful, has a problem. In courting indies, Nintendo has spent a good deal of its first year courting yesterday's indies. An updated version of the hit Stardew Valley; an expanded version of retro love letter Shovel Knight. The Switch's lineup often has had the air of a fabulous secondhand store, offering some incredible finds and fond memories but nothing new. Don't get me wrong, there have been a few successful fresh titles on the Switch (the beautiful Graceful Explosion Machine comes to mind), but Nintendo's first year with the Switch has been defined not just by ports and indies, but by ports and… indie ports.
Not that you can really blame Nintendo. The games they've gotten placed on the Switch are good ones, and they're titles that people have wanted. Porting a game to the Switch still has a lot of power and mystique in it, and even games that have been everywhere like Super Meat Boy have sold better on the Switch than on any other platform outside of their initial releases. People want these games on the go. Courting established talent and getting popular indies involved in the console shows more savvy in navigating the western indie game scene than Nintendo has shown in its entire company history.
But if Nintendo wants to truly commit to excellent independent games, and truly establish the Switch as a home for them, it has to do more than court established talent. It has to develop new talent. Going into the second year of the Switch, Nintendo has an opportunity to embrace the independent gaming community in a broader way than it has in the past. Otherwise, there's a risk that the Switch could find itself in a rut, only ever repeating the successes of other segments of the indie market instead of creating its own.
Games like Celeste, which Nintendo supported through the entire last year of its development, are a start. Original, stunning works from established developers. But Nintendo, with its resources and the growing good will of its audience, has the chance to do a lot more.
