When it comes to co-op games on the Switch, I’ll admit that my wife and I consistently wish there were more of them. One problem is that she’s a bit picky, not really digging things like beat-em-ups or shooters that can often feature multiplayer support. It tends to be the action games that catch her attention, and we’ve gotten quite used to playing split-screen over time. The How 2 Escape series has managed to share a different vision for how games like this can work though, letting the primary player have full control over the main screen, and then having a support player help them out using a free app they can download onto their mobile phone or tablet.

Conceptually, the easiest thing to compare this experience to would be a series of escape rooms. Working as a team, each player will need to communicate pretty well everything in front of them, sometimes even needing to dip into small details, in the interests of either person working out how the information or elements in front of them relate to what’s on the other person’s screen. Whether it’s shapes, numbers, patterns, or any number of other clues, getting over the hump of the first few puzzles, and getting a bit more locked into how the game operates is crucial to success, and it’s possible less patient or observant pairs may choose to bail pretty quickly because of this.

In order to succeed you’ll ideally continue to communicate everything you’re seeing to one another, trying to be as detailed as possible. In almost every case, the information on your side is in some way incomplete, but if you’re able to find the connection to something your partner has, you can then begin chipping away at solutions. While we didn’t do it all the time, I’ll admit that there were times where we looked at each other’s screens, trying to find connections, and in a pinch that typically worked. In theory, we could have used the in-game hint system but quite honestly it never told us anything we hadn’t already worked out. More often than not the challenge was in how the information on either side connected, not in where to look or what you were trying to do on a high level. Another issue that was regrettable, was in a puzzle where there were 4 variations of multiple elements that needed to be matched. In the case of 2 of them, quite honestly, the image on the mobile side was ambiguous at best, and in the end we needed to brute force between the potential options with both to solve the mystery. It stinks when you know exactly what you need to do, but the clarity of what you’re working with is just low enough that you still somehow get held up on moving on.

All things considered, this is a pretty solid puzzle-solving and communication-testing experience. While it has some flaws, in general we found we could get around them by continuing to work more and more directly together when it was necessary, and that was fine with us. I’d have preferred not to get held up with some ambiguous images in a few cases, since that seems like an easily-preventable issue, but thankfully it was only with 2 elements out of 5, so iterating through wasn’t that much of an ordeal. If you’re looking for a challenge for the mind, rather than for your controller skills, this may be just the thing!