With so many games released in a single year, I can’t reasonably get upset with anyone for sleeping on a great indie. My personal list of games I loved in 2024, for instance, has nearly 80 games on it. That’s too many! All you can do is wait for the perfect moment to recommend a game that got slept on when it launched. Today is that perfect moment: Minishoot’ Adventures, one of 2024’s best indies, is now available on Nintendo Switch. Don’t let it slip under your radar twice.
Announced during today’s Nintendo Indie World showcase, the formerly PC-exclusive Minishoot’ Adventures has finally made its way to both the original Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 via an upgraded edition. It’s one of those ports that’s surprising because it feels like it should have always been on a Nintendo platform. The genre-fusing adventure game is one of the best Zelda-style games of the 2020s, and it earns that accolade by doing something different with a time-honored formula.
Minishoot’ Adventures is both a top-down adventure game and a twin-stick shooter. If that sounds a little confusing on paper, I promise it works like a charm in practice. You control a tiny spaceship that can turn and shoot in 360 degrees, like a vessel pulled from an old arcade machine. Naturally, you’ll need that power to shoot waves of aliens that populate a doomed world in need of saving. Move, spin, and shoot to survive. Simple enough.
The twist is that all of that is placed into an open-world adventure game in the vein of the original Legend of Zelda. You’re tossed into a map full of secrets that tempt you to explore every single nook and cranny. You’ll discover health upgrades, gain abilities that open up inaccessible parts of the map, and even pop into full-on dungeons. It’s the Zelda playbook followed to perfection, except with a bullet-hell twist that has you dodging waves of projectiles during boss fights.
It’s a novel premise that could easily have made for a gimmicky game, but developer SoulGame Studio nails its assignment by hammering down the good old art of gamefeel. Your ship glides around fluidly and pops enemies in a satisfying little explosion of crystals. With a level-up system that lets you gradually upgrade your ship’s rate of fire, damage, and more, Minishoot’ Adventures has a remarkably natural sense of growth. It takes you from controlling a dinky ship that plinks out one shot at a time to a turbo-powered machine gun that can wipe out a dozen enemies in a flash.
If you love classic Zelda games or twin-stick shooters, Minishoot’ Adventures is an easy recommendation. If you love both, preemptively call in sick tomorrow because you’re not going to be able to put it down once you start playing.
Minishoot’ Adventures is available now on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 for $15.99. It’s also available for Windows PC.
