It's hard to remember a game from a major publisher that faced the same headwinds as Everybody 1-2 Switch. In 2022, before its official announcement, Fanbyte reported that the game had done especially poorly in focus testing, leading Nintendo to consider the possibility of scrapping the project altogether. Then, this year, Nintendo surprise-announced that Everybody 1-2 Switch is in fact coming, and very soon at that, for a discount price of $30 USD (the original game cost $50). So I approached a recent hands-on session with a sort of morbid curiosity--would this be as bad as the report suggested, or had Nintendo sufficiently turned things around? Based on limited play time in a very large group dynamic, it seems like a decent party game--with one notable exception that, if indicative of more minigames like it, could really sour the experience.
We played a set of five minigames, showcasing the different styles of play. Some games could be played with Switch Joy-Cons, others with a mobile smart device, and some games could simultaneously support any combination of both. The latter options are how Everybody 1-2 Switch achieves the recently announced 100-player count for certain minigames. Our group for the preview was around 15 people--a much smaller number but it still got the point across that you can play these games with a big group.
The first game we played was Balloons, which used the Joy-Cons. We were divided randomly into teams--you can ask the game to pick them for you--and each one would be shown a brief flash of a balloon silhouette. You'd then have to move the controller like a bicycle pump to inflate your balloon, trying to match as closely as possible to the silhouette without going over. If you went even a single pump too far, it popped. But since everyone on the team was contributing to the pumping, you would need to communicate when to stop and whether the balloon could take one more pump--and if so, who should be the one to do it. It had the raucous, risky energy of Jenga, amplified by all the moves happening simultaneously. A round was done in less than a minute, and the winner was best out of five.
The second game was Hip Bump, in which you placed your Joy-Cons behind your back and then tried to do a quick butt-thrusting motion to knock your opponent out of a ring, sumo-style. We were instructed to stay some distance apart, presumably so a room full of journalists and influencers wouldn't actually bump posteriors. It was incredibly silly, especially given that the players were represented on-screen by theme park-style bunny costumes. Both of these first two games were the kind of ridiculous fun that would be good for a party atmosphere in short bursts, but could also easily outstay their welcome.
We moved on to games that support smart devices, starting with Color Shoot. This one was presented like you were the new hotshot photographer of a New York fashion magazine, and your first big gig is to match the latest stylish colors. After pairing cameras on loaner-iPhones, we were asked to roam around and find objects that matched a color swatch within a time limit, and snap a picture. It seemed pretty sensitive to elements like lighting conditions, but the interface judged the photos in a way that felt easy to understand. The results screen, which shows which photos everyone used, is a nice little moment to inspire conversation as we all reviewed and compared our finds.
Then came the worst of the bunch: a UFO game centered around attracting aliens by doing a sort of rhythmic chant, by raising your phone above your head and then back down to your chest in time with the beat. The phone screen had buttons to make sure you kept both thumbs on it while repeating the motion, and the better you kept to the beat, the faster the aliens would approach. However, this was again a group activity like Balloon, which meant the entire team had to stay in-time with the beat together. Anyone deviating from it would throw it off and make the aliens back away. It became a self-perpetuating problem. As time went on, my arms started to ache, and it was clear from the tone of the room that others were feeling the burn as well. It became harder and harder for us to keep time, but any of us failing to keep going meant the whole round would be prolonged for everyone. We were all locked into this exhausting, joyless slog together. It was miserable. I'm far from a peak physical specimen, but by the end, it seemed like everyone was wiped out regardless of their fitness level. I never want to play that minigame again.
The final minigame was, thankfully, sedentary. It was a quiz game with simple A-B selections for the answers, and giving a speedy, correct answer meant more points. (Inversely, answering incorrectly too quickly meant a bigger loss of points, so it's worth thinking carefully if you aren't sure.) There were a few different quizzes to choose from under the Quiz Party minigame banner, but for the purposes of our demo, we were given a custom quiz. The Nintendo representatives noted that this is meant to be for gatherings like baby showers or bachelorette parties, where you'll know your party-goers and create a custom quiz about them. It's a cute idea, and the interface is no-fuss and easy to understand. The presentation also noted that a "spontaneous quiz" option will let everyone contribute questions to build a quiz quickly. However, since this was a custom quiz created for this preview--with questions mostly revolving around the preview event itself--I didn't get a taste for the more general-purpose, pre-made quizzes. A trivia game is only as good as its questions, and I didn't get a feel for how difficult they would be, or if there was a database large enough to avoid repeated questions.
All of this is wrapped in a presentation that is meant to be comical and cute, centered around the host, Horace the horse. Horace may be jumping on the horse-mask meme a few years too late, but the actual hosting animations have some visual effects that make him look like a mixture of live-action and surreal animated creature, and it was enough to elicit a few smiles from me.
It's a cliche to say that a game is a mixed bag, but in the case of Everybody 1-2 Switch, it's very apt. The games are definitionally disconnected from each other, so some are stronger than others, and some will be better suited for different groups. There are 17 base games in all, many of which have variations. Based on our limited playtime, I can't say what the ratio of good-to-bad is, but I have to hope it's mostly quick diversions like Balloon or clever uses of smart device functionality like Color Shoot. The more games like UFO there are, the worse the package will be. Like any party, it just takes one rude guest to ruin the whole thing for Everybody.
