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Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes Switch review - "A good port which misses some prime opportunities"

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Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes Switch review - "A good port which misses some prime opportunities"

Ever wanted to save the world from inside a tiny room? Enjoy solving puzzles with friends? Good at describing things? Great, because Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes will still cause you as much grief as humanly possible no matter your skill.

But, that's not a bad thing. Half the fun of bomb-defusing is dealing with your own blind panic as the timer slowly ticks down. After all, it's not really a cooperative game if there's no risk of losing friends over it, right?

Cut the fourth wire

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a puzzler of two parts. On one side you've got a team of friends who take charge of the manual. On the other, you're trying to defuse the bomb while feeding descriptions of the tasks along to your team. You can't see the answers, they can't see the bomb, and so the fun begins.

As you progress through the levels it gets harder and harder since you've only got a set amount of time and generally two strikes to spare. If you mess up after that or run out of time it's game over, baby.

While there are a handful of tricky wire puzzles to work through, there are also coloured buttons, memory, maze, password, and Morse code puzzles, as well as word challenges and more.

If that's not enough, you've got to keep an eye on which LEDs are lit up, if there are parallel ports, the numbers and letters of your serial number, and how many batteries your bomb has. Oh, and sometimes getting a strike or two can change the outcome of some answers.

It's possible to get through the game using the modules' proper names, but real fun comes in trying to understand each other's questionable directions. The 'Keypad' module is a particular favourite of mine as you describe all different symbols to your team and they have to tell you what order to press the buttons in.

That doesn't sound so thrilling, but the fun is in realising that you're all somehow in sync with your own ridiculous association. Though, 'sad violin' was a bad (albeit hilarious) choice when compared to 'upside-down Y', I'll admit.

Okay… cut all of the wires

Its controls are easy enough, though Steel Crate missed a trick in not implementing motion controls in its Switch version. It would've been really interesting to rotate the bomb around using the Joy-Con or to physically try to cut wires with shaky hands.

At one point I touched the screen instinctively in handheld mode, so it also would've been nice to have the option to interact physically with the game as well. Thankfully its buttery smooth framerate and ease of use doesn't make this much of a deal-breaker – more of a missed opportunity.

Though it appears to be a repetitive process, the game's addition of tougher modules, different times to do it in, and background distractions make it that much more engaging. Particularly difficult ones include the 'needy' modules which need to be managed constantly to stop them from going off.

Not much has changed since Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes came out in 2015 and that's mostly a good thing. Whether you're playing through the campaign mode or prefer taking on your very own bombs in Free Play mode, it'll keep you on your toes.

There's no major need to pick it up if you've got the game on another platform already, but at such a low price it's hard not to recommend it to liven up social gatherings.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes Switch review - "A good port which misses some prime opportunities"

This is another fantastic port of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes and with the added convenience of taking it on the go, too
Score
Emily Sowden
Emily Sowden
Emily is Pocket Gamer's News Editor and writes about all kinds of game-related things. She needs coffee to function and begrudgingly loves her Switch more than she lets on.