Double Pug Switch Switch Review – Leap Between Dimensions

In Double Pug Switch, you take control of an adorable little pet pug named Otis. Your owner is a scientist, and when her experiment is sabotaged by the dog-hating cat Whiskers, Otis gets covered in some strange chemicals. What do these chemicals do, you ask? Well, they give Otis the ability to swap between two different dimensions, creating a very cool game mechanic. Throw in all the other awesome things this game has to offer, and you’ve got something pretty excellent, with a few negatives to let it down.

So, here is my review on Double Pug Switch on the Nintendo Switch (Double Switch!)!

The gameplay is grouped into difficult levels, each with coins and some collectables. In these levels, you have to jump across platforms and switch to different dimensions to make obstacles and platforms disappear and reappear. As Otis never stops running, you have to make sure you’re pressing the buttons at exactly the right time, or else you’ll die and have to start from the latest checkpoint.

At the end of each group of levels, there’s a boss fight. I really enjoyed the bosses as they keep the main switch mechanic going while having a giant Whiskers shooting the obstacles.

The coins and collectables I mentioned earlier have a purpose, though. Maybe the most important purpose a virtual coin can have is… hats! There are a bunch of cool hats in Double Pug Switch, some referencing pop culture, some just looking cool. Even when you run, the hat does a cute little wobble which is just amazing.

I also have to briefly mention the soundtrack, which is upbeat and fits really nicely with the style of the game. However, each time you die the track starts again, which made it almost tedious to listen to. This could have easily been fixed by just keeping the music going when you die rather than resetting.

Double Pug Switch doesn’t have many levels, but it’s challenging enough that it will still take at least five hours to complete, unless you have incredibly good reflexes. Generally, I enjoy tricky platforming like this, but in this particular case I wasn’t motivated by the story. So if it got boring, I’d just stop, rather than pushing through to find out what happens to the characters. I think if there was just a little bit more story, I would have enjoyed the game a lot more.

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The buttons were pretty strangely mapped as well. On most Nintendo Switch platformers the jump button is set to B, but in this game it was set to A with B being used to switch dimensions. There wasn’t any way to change this in-game, and since A and B are the only buttons you need to use, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just assign jump to B in the first place. There were also quite a few glitches which occasionally made the game laggy and unresponsive, and these were especially painful when you were only a few seconds away from a checkpoint.

Double Pug Switch has smart mechanics, cute animation, nice music, and hats, but it’s let down by glitches and an unmotivating story. I think there are a lot of little details that could be touched up for a better experience. However, if you can get it cheap on a sale, it’s something worth adding to your library if you’re willing for poor Otis to be jabbed by spikes and shot by lasers over and over again.

Double Pug Switch Review provided by Nintendo Link
Publisher: aPriori Digital
Developer: The Polygon Loft
Release Date: October 22, 2020
Price: $8.99, £6.99, €7.99
Game Size: 657 MB