Platformer · 2017 · SFB Games · local
Snipperclips
Two paper figures snip each other into whatever shape the puzzle happens to need.
What it is about
You control two paper figures, and each can cut the other. Duck while the other snips and you lose a piece — that is the whole game: two shapes that together have to add up to something.
The tasks are little stages. A basketball into a hoop, a pencil into a sharpener, a tooth out of a mouth. How you cut the shapes is up to you, and there is almost never only one way.
You cannot lose. If a figure ends up cut too small, a button press restores it — which sets the tone: try, laugh, try again. Alongside that sit a party mode and a competitive mode for up to four.
Our verdict for couples
Two paper figures stand side by side, and when one slides over the other it cuts a piece out of it. That is the entire game: you turn each other into whatever shape the puzzle currently needs, arguing continuously about who takes how much off where. Everyone has grasped it after two minutes, nobody can lose, and so even the person who usually only watches joins in — which is not a given on the Switch. After one good evening the story is done, though, and what comes beyond it is more of an extra than a second half.
Pros
- Anybody gets it after two minutes
- Every puzzle allows several solutions
- Losing is not provided for
Cons
- The story is over after about four hours
- The party modes are an afterthought
- Playing alone is a chore
Suitable from
Casual
- Conflict potential
- Heated
- Cosiness
- Cosy
- When you can stop
- Any time
- How long it lasts
- Under 5 hours
What other co-op fans say
On Metacritic the user score sits at 8.4 from 395 votes, and the voices agree strikingly on one point: this is a game for two, and for two who talk. Married couples get mentioned outright more than once. The flip side is stated just as plainly — alone it is a chore, and with one person on the controller the snipping makes little sense. Anybody buying it as a solo game is buying the wrong thing.
- “This is the best coop game that my wife and I have ever played together.”
- “You just cannot play this game without talking with (or yelling at) your buddy all the time, and that's what made it work.”
- “controlling with only one person is incredibly tedious.”
Summarised by machine from 395 Metacritic user reviews, not written by our editors. The quotes appear verbatim in those reviews.
If you like this one
Runs on the same devices as this game.
Two wobbly rubber figures solve puzzles in dreamlike landscapes — though the falling off takes up the larger share.
A tiny blocky platformer that gets past not one single level without you two talking.
You build the course you then have to run yourselves — and the other one is building too.
Limbot unreviewed
Rating to comeUp to four people jointly steer a cardboard robot — on one screen.
Related in the magazine
- Guide
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The answer is clearer than it ought to be — it just isn't where everyone counts. We sorted fifty couch co-op games by device, and the result surprised us.
- Guide
When one of you never plays
The usual advice is: pick something easy. It is wrong, and wrong from both directions. What actually helps are four design patterns — and a list of what does not.