The Nintendo Direct Indie World was another dud – except for the last 30 seconds

Two of the best games of 2024 are coming to Switch, and one of them is out today, but the latest Nintendo Direct barely mentioned them.

Thanks to Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza, the Nintendo Switch 2 now has two of the highest rated video games of the year under its belt. But its future, both immediate and long term, remains unclear. Not necessarily in the sense that there’s anything to worry about, but purely because Nintendo is saying so little about what comes next.

We still don’t have firm release dates for Metroid Prime 4, Kirby Air Riders, or Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Imprisonment, and no clue at all as to what’s out next year. On top of that, the third party focused Nintendo Direct from last month was a surprisingly uninspiring affair, with rumours suggesting several games were cut from its line-up at the last minute.

Only a week later and today had another new Nintendo Direct, this one an Indie World variant focusing on, you guessed it, indie games. Sadly, it was only 15 minutes long and seemed to have even less reason for existing than last week’s, except for two exciting announcements buried in a brief montage at the end.

Since it is so short, we advise watching the whole thing, as we’re sure some, if not most, of these games will turn out very well.

Mina The Hollower by the makers of Shovel Knight will almost certainly be worth the long wait for it to appear, although there’s not long to go now as its release date was announced as October 31. The game’s a top-down action adventure that looks like a long lost Game Boy Color game, if a Game Boy Color Pro was a thing that actually existed.

Animal herding game Herdling had some impressive 3D visuals and while Neverway’s near monochromatic graphics may put off more people than it attracts the idea of battling to become an immortal herald for a Lovecraftian god is certainly an unusual set-up.

Herdling is out on August 21 but Neverway and a number of the other titles aren’t out till 2026 or a purposefully ambiguous ‘winter’, so there was even less to look forward to in the short term.

Puzzle game Is This Seat Taken? was the only shadow drop to get the spotlight, while a free update for Little Kitty, Big City was only promised for sometime later this year.

Auto-scrolling roguelike Ball X Pit looked interesting though, and you could definitely see the influences from Vampire Survivors, which the developer openly admitted to. It’s out on October 15 on the original Switch but, interestingly, not until ‘autumn’ on Switch 2 – hinting at the fact that many indie developers have had trouble getting hold of Switch 2 devkits to make their games on.

Most of these games will be multiformat, and almost all of them will be on at least PC, although Glaciered was described as a timed Switch exclusive. It looked to be an impressively complex action role-playing game, with an unusual underwater setting. It’s down for ‘winter 2025’, which technically should only mean December.

That was the closest the Direct came to having a mic drop moment and yet it hid what was, for us, the most exciting news of the day, in a brief montage right at the end. In amongst new titles like Winter Burrow and Strange Antiquities was confirmation that two of the best games of 2024 are now coming to Switch.

UFO 50 is an amazing compilation of 50 completely different games, many by different developers, while Caves Of Qud is an insanely complex role-playing game that was literally 15 years in the making.

Caves Of Qud is out in ‘winter 2025’, while UFO 50 is out today. It’s a real shame more time wasn’t spent on promoting it, as surely that was the whole point of the Direct. Instead, we imagine most people will have completely missed it and/or have no idea what it is.

It has a 91 on Metacritic though and we gave it 9/10 on PC, so we really do advise you give it a try. As we write this it’s not yet on the eShop, so we don’t know how much it is, but it was £20.99 on PC.

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