The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild isn’t the only must buy title on the Nintendo Switch, as the $20 multiplayer puzzler Snipperclips – Cut it Out, Together! deserves a place right alongside it.
In Snipperclips, players control Snip and Clip, two fingertip shaped pieces of paper with legs and adorable faces that make funny expressions. Players must solve puzzles by overlapping these paper pals by cutting them into the proper shapes for the job.
The gameplay and controls are simple enough to pick up and play, though in my experience controlling movement with a stick instead of a d-pad can still throw the average casual-player through a loop. Characters are rotated via the buttons on the top of the Joy-Con, which are much more comfortable with the wrist strap accessories packed in with the Switch console. Snip and Clip can also rotate, duck, stand on their tiptoes, and jump (even on each other!). Standing on tiptoes and crouching are necessities in the game’s later levels, and that requires a bit of finesse with the control stick, which takes a bit of getting used to since the sticks are a smaller than other consoles. However, if a mistake is made, you can fully reform characters by holding a button or simply cutting them out of existence, so players can make mistakes.
Of the 69 included stages, 45 of them are available in the “World” mode that acts as the core of the game for 1 or 2 players. These stages are spread across three different groups, all of which have their own themes that are reinforced visually and through gameplay. For example, the first world looks like graphing paper, and the second world is inspired by retro video games both aesthetically and in the handling of the puzzles included in that section.
While Snipperclips looks rather simple, there is plenty of depth, and it manages to stay fresh until the end, regardless of if you play alone or with a friend. Granted, a few puzzles have similar objectives. One recurring premise involves cutting out an image or even another player to be the right shape, but still, most have puzzles have unique goals. One level requires players to cut a small opening in one character for a pencil to fall in that drops when another player touches a button. The pencil must then be carried to a pencil sharpener and inserted. While this puzzle was rather intricate, it is one of the easier puzzles. Other puzzles involve guiding heart pieces to a princess, catching fish and placing them in a tank, and using a claw machine to move a player across the screen. While at first glance Snipperclips looks rather simple, there is plenty of depth to be found here, and it manages to stay fresh until the end, regardless of if you play alone or with a friend.
The two to four player “Party” mode has players controlling two copies of Snip and Clip, instead of just one set. Party offers 21 levels to play, some of which have to be unlocked via World mode. 12 of these levels appear to be unique while the other 9 are harder versions of levels found in World mode changed to accommodate the 2 extra characters on screen. While World mode is fine to play alone, Party mode requires you have a friend or a whole lot of patience to attempt to complete the levels on your own. It can be a little crowded on screen making accidental cuts or moving pieces of puzzles where you don’t mean to, but these moments only add to the hilarity and fun of the game.
The final 3 levels, or in this case mini-games, belong to the 2 to 4 player “Blitz” mode, and they include “Hoops,” “Hockey”, and “Dojo”. As you may imagine Hoops is just basketball, where a ball drops from the ceiling and players race to hit the ball into the correct goals with their noggins. This is my favourite of the bunch as it requires a bit more strategy than the other two, and is far more original. Hockey is essentially air hockey or Pong, only your character is the paddle and you can cut the other players, just like in the rest of the game. Finally, Dojo is strictly you and other players trying to cut each other out of existence, which is fun but too simple to want to play more than a time or two. All three of these mini-games would have benefitted from having multiple stages to play on, but alas, they do not which essentially kills their replayability.
While Snipperclips was originally an indie game called FriendShapes, I can assure you it feels at home being a new Nintendo IP. The characters are cute and memorable with their silly faces they make, though I’m not sure which is Snip and which is Clip. I find myself wanting to buy a shirt and or poster with their mugs on it either way. The music reminds me a lot of what you’d find in one of the Yoshi games, that is to say equally as cute as the art direction, and just as memorable and hum worthy.
Snipperclips feels right home in Nintendo’s colorful and loveable library. The characters are cute, the music is memorable, the gameplay is easy to pick up with the right amount of challenge, and the amount of content is perfect for the budget price of admission. If you’ve got a Nintendo Switch and a friend or three, you’d be a fool to pass on this gem up.
