Grave Danger
Nintendo Switch

What do you do when everyone in the world wants you dead and alive? You clear your name of course! That’s what you’ll find yourself doing in Grave Danger on the Nintendo Switch. Dante is a cowboy who finds himself way out in the middle of nowhere after completing a job on a train. Making his way back to where he came from, he comes across a WANTED poster with his face plastered on and shifts his intentions towards cleansing his name.

As you play, you’ll meet a couple other characters who are in the same perdicament : Wanted dead and alive. You’ll meet Elliott the wizard and Malice the reaper, and it’s with all three of them that you’ll need to traverse all of the games levels. Each character has their own special ability that becomes key to solving the games puzzles. Dante can wall jump making it easy to climb upwards, Elliott can double jump to reach further places, and Malice can glide for a short period of time to help get you over gaps. Other than these jump abilities, the three characters are fairly identical in their performance.

While the game’s levels will feel a bit tough at first, you’ll soon realize that it’s really due to the one of the game’s biggest flaws. You’ll be forced to swap between the three characters to find your way to the exit. To properly complete the level, all three of the characters need to make it to the exit. At no point are you given a way to move all of the characters collectively. Which makes sense because, as I said above, each character has a unique ability which will have to be utilized throughout the level. Generally this can lead to quite a bit of leaving behind. Bring one character to where they need to be used, then another, and so on until it’s all done. But, once you hit that home stretch it would be nice to hold a trigger or something and move everyone together. Except you can’t.

One good thing is the game’s use of a checkpoint system. Let’s face it, there’s many paths and options for each path, you’re going to experiment. Some of this experimenting will inevitably lead to a characters demise. Luckily, that won’t force you into restarting the entire level with all three. Instead, the character who died will be transformed into a ghost, and you’ll need to find your way back to a graveyard. These are placed sporadically in each level and are much easier to get to than anything else, since you can pass through a lot of the game’s hindrances like steel gates and thin floors.

This version of Grave Danger on the Switch is packed as the Ultimate Edition. It comes with an overhauled user-interface, ten new levels, and a whole slew of new gameplay features. Now, I myself haven’t played the vanilla version of this game, so I can’t compare the two. However, even without playing the earlier version, this game is so much fun. It can be tedious switching between each character one at a time, but the puzzles contained in the levels can be real mind benders. When I first started playing I was annoyed at how limited each character was, but if it had been done any other way this game would have just fallen into the ocean of other games just like it. Even though multiple character games have been done before, the way it’s done with this is a lot of fun and is more than worth a playthrough or two. And yes, it does support local co-op play so grab a buddy and go save the good name of these outlaws.