Snipperclips – Cut It Out, Together! Is An Early Gem For The Nintendo Switch

I struggle to remember the name of this game. It’s Snipperclips – Cut it out, together!, but my mind refuses to remember that, instead calling it Clippersnips – Cutting Things, Together!, the much darker Scissorclips – Cut Ourselves, Together!, or some other amalgamation of similar sounding words. The easily muddled name aside, this is one of the most charming little games I’ve seen in recent times, and has a real chance to shine as one of the few games available for the Nintendo Switch in March.

This is a game with a rather interesting path to its development, having been shown and demoed as an indie game back in 2015 with the somewhat more memorable name FriendShapes. Tom and Adam Vian from SFB Games are still involved in its development, but Nintendo have brought this particular project under their wing, rebranding it as a new IP and giving it their internal development and publishing resources.

The game features a pair of papery characters with a pair of legs to run around on and little faces that pull all manner of amusing little expressions as you play. Their bodies start squared off at the top and rounded off at the other, but all of that can change in a matter of seconds.

You see, the two characters can cut into one another with a tap of a button. You can rotate the body as you see fit, then take little nicks or huge chunks out when you overlay the two. This is handily demonstrated by the early tutorial levels where you first have to both stand in dashed outlines, then overlay the two characters to make a heart shape, and then create more interesting shapes that force you to cut each other to size. The pained expressions are adorably sad, but you can always return them to their original shape.

That’s really just scratching the surface of the game’s puzzles though. Ultimately, it’s less about creating shapes and more about using those shapes to interact with the world and different objects. You might have to cut down to size so that you can reach a button tucked into a wall, use one character as a ramp to push a pencil up onto a ledge and into a sharpener, or try to get a basketball through a hoop. My favourite instance of lateral thinking came from needing to pop a bunch of balloons, and you naturally have to cut one of them down to a fine point in order to pierce them.

However, you don’t always need to do things in a prescribed manner. Looking through the screenshots, I see that they turned one character into a little basket of sorts for the basketball to rest in, whereas we quite torturously balanced it on the flat surface and bounced it up through the hoop from underneath. It’s a little reminiscent of Scribblenauts in that regard, as you’re free to try and fudge your way through a puzzle.

You can play this solo, but it’s absolutely meant to be played in co-op, which is effortlessly realised by the Switch’s paired Joy-Con – in fact, the game supports up to four players, but the demo at last week’s Switch event was for two. There’s the familiar joy of working together to try and solve a problem, putting forward ideas and seeing what works – the staff looking after the Switch units were nice enough to play dumb and let me figure things out – and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how the puzzles develop through the rest of the game.

Though not there on day one for Nintendo Switch, Clipped ‘n’ Snipped Snipperclips arrival in the console’s launch month gives it the perfect opportunity to shine. It’s cute, it’s clever, and it’s a fantastic use of the Switch’s built in multiplayer.