A few years ago, I strapped an Oculus Rift DK2 to my face and joined a Skype call with Andrew and Chris. They spent an hour or so trying to talk me through defusing a bomb. It was awesome. We all loved it. We never played it again. It wasn’t the game’s fault, the game was fantastic. It’s just hard to coordinate a play session with friends spread across an entire country.
Fast forward several years and I’m able to have that same experience just by walking to a friend’s house with my Switch in my backpack. There’s no clumsy swapping of headsets, no need for large areas of separation, it was just me and two friends in a living room playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. We had a blast, pun absolutely intended.
For those unfamiliar with the game, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a party game where one player is in charge of defusing an explosive device while the others are the “experts” in charge of giving directions on how to defuse these vile mechanisms. The challenge is that the experts can’t see the bomb and the defuser can’t see the manual. It’s a game of communication, miscommunication, and occasional frantic yelling with a healthy dose random guesses that occasionally pay off.
Pro tip, if there are only a few seconds left on the timer, you have no strikes, and several wires to cut. Just start cutting them. If it works, you look like the hero. If it doesn’t, your friends should have interpreted your description better and faster.
While the game is unchanged from its appearances on other platforms, the Switch carries a unique advantage that none of the others have, portability. It’s so easy to just hand the console around a table or some assembled chairs. The 720p display on the Switch tablet is more than capable of delivering all the detail a player needs to provide an adequate description of the device. Trust me, vocabulary limitations will be the deciding factor in success and failure well before graphical fidelity.
Pro tip, print copies of the manual for ease of navigation. While the PDF can be viewed online, there’s simply no replacing the ability to thumb through several pages at once with zero input lag. Also, this provides you with an excuse for when you inevitably fail because of that one friend that claims they can navigate a PDF on their phone faster than they can a stack of papers.
I initially expected this version of the game to be less immersive than the VR version I played all those many years ago. I was dead wrong. The immersion of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes doesn’t come from the setting, though the cracked walls implying the failure of people before you does help set an ominous mood, it comes from the tension of a ticking time bomb literally being in your hands. It comes from watching the seconds inexorably tick away while your friends try to decipher a password or logic out which wire to cut. The game does get easier as you develop a shorthand with your friends to help streamline communication but just as you start to build up that rapport the game starts throwing harder modules at you that tax everyone’s abilities.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is an older game but its easy to learn, hard to master gameplay loop gives it legs beyond its years. Teaming this game with the versatility and portability of the Nintendo Switch is so obvious an idea I’m surprised it took the developers this long to implement it. Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is available now on the Nintendo Switch and I absolutely recommend it.
