The Switch 2’s GameShare multiplayer turns this horror game into an unexpected comedy

GameShare, a multiplayer feature that’s exclusive to the Switch 2, is a neat concept that so far has mostly been used in pretty standard ways. It lets you use one copy of a game and beam it to multiple Switches, making it a great way to experience local co-op titles like Survival Kids or Split Fiction. But I’ve finally found an inventive, and quite frankly bizarre, use for GameShare: turning survival horror into something more like a comedy.

Tokyo Scramble launches this week as a Switch 2 exclusive, and it’s a game that channels some of the slow, deliberate pace of genre classics like the original Resident Evil. You play as Anne, a woman who was riding a subway in Tokyo that then crashed deep into the Earth, revealing a hidden underground world full of dinosaur-like monsters. You don’t have a gun or any weapons to defend yourself. Instead, Anne’s most important tool is her smartwatch: It lets her interact with everything from escalators to turnstiles in order to distract the monsters and then sneak to safety.

In that way it’s like old-school survival horror mixed with a puzzle game, as you have to figure out how to use the environment to stay safe while dealing with new and increasingly dangerous creatures. An early boss, for example, is a giant bat with super-sensitive hearing, forcing you to stay perfectly still whenever its ears perk up. But turn on a fire alarm using your watch and that keen sense of hearing becomes a weakness.

At this point you might be asking yourself how, exactly, that kind of solitary survival experience could work as a multiplayer game. And the answer is pretty unexpected. Using GameShare, you can play Tokyo Scramble with up to three other people. And you all play by controlling different aspects of the same character. One player could manage Anne’s movement, for instance, while another is in charge of rotating the camera. I played through a number of levels as a two-player experience with the following setup: I was in charge of moving around the levels, while my partner handled everything else (camera, performing actions, and activating the smartwatch apps).

This is, as you can probably imagine, a challenging way to play a video game. I kept having to say out loud that I needed the camera pointed in a specific direction so that I could actually see the dinosaurs I was trying to avoid, while my partner would snap at me to get closer to something they needed to interact with. These are all actions I intuitively perform when playing a game like this solo, but I had to really think about what I needed to do — and then vocalize it — in order to get anywhere in Tokyo Scramble. And to be clear, we didn’t get very far. Our version of Anne, controlled by two different people, kept being slaughtered by giant praying mantises with glowing red eyes. We were yelling at each other just to perform the most basic tasks, which we almost always failed to do.

The thing is, while the added challenge of playing cooperatively sucked out any of the tension or scares in the game, it did turn it into a singular experience that was actually kind of fun. It was certainly like no other multiplayer game I’d ever played before. It had a lot of the same appeal as the friendslop genre that has taken over Twitch and YouTube: The goofiness is part of what makes it work when you’re playing with a bud.

Mostly, though, Tokyo Scramble has me hoping to see more experiments like this in the Switch 2’s future. Nintendo consoles often have gimmicky features that go underutilized, like the HD rumble of the original Switch that didn’t get much use outside of a handful of titles. It’d be a shame if the same happened to GameShare. And given how many Switch consoles are out there — GameShare supports both the Switch 2 and the original Switch for sharing games — there’s a lot of potential. We just need some more out-there ideas like Tokyo Scramble.