Playing with a friend, you each take control of one ambulance driver, keeping in time with one another as you pull out the stretcher and try to manoeuvre it under the casualties – before quite literally lobbing them into the back of the ambulance. It’s not all stretcher-wielding – you can ride a zip wire (there’s only one), or team up to use saws and fireworks. Arriving at your destination shifts the perspective to that of a co-op puzzle. From there, you can jump into the ambulance and then set off for wherever your objective marker is on the map, leaving a trail of smashed lampposts and floored pedestrians in your wake.

It feels as if the developers were heavily inspired by the kids’ TV show Lazytown for the game’s look and its antagonist – though apparently it looks even more akin to Paw Patrol, Twitter has informed me.įor the most part, The Stretchers plays a bit like LEGO City Undercover, with the hospital (which cures all of its patients with an outdoor ray machine, for some crazy reason) acting as the home base. This is a kooky game which blends a simplistic open world – way off the Hyrule of Breath of the Wild, and even a little less detailed than the Wuhu Island of Wii Sports Resort – with bitesize puzzle challenges where the two ambulance drivers must negotiate a series of hazards in order to extract unconscious patients known as ‘Dizzies’, who have been put into their state of deliriousness by the evil Captain Brain. While one player holds the door open, the other can move a crate to keep it that way. As with the likes of Snipperclips and Flip Wars before it on Switch, Nintendo has produced their latest wacky concept as a download exclusive, but this effort is packed with the sort of insane genius which brings us to think there might be more to be seen from its paramedic protagonists in the future. The Stretchers, released on the Switch eShop last week totally out of the blue, shows things have changed, as far as our favourite Japanese gaming giant’s attitude to new ideas goes. There was a time when a new Nintendo IP would be promoted with months of magazine articles, tongues wagging in the darkest corners of online message boards, and word of mouth bringing anticipation to boiling point.

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