Reviews
[Review] ‘Neverwinter Nights’ on Switch is Overwhelming, Yet Enticing
Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, the closest BioWare ever came to making a horror game, is out now on Nintendo Switch*.
*It also came out on PS4 and Xbox One this week! But, I spent 25 hours playing this baby the way 100-hour RPGs were meant to be played and you should to: sprawled on the couch with the Switch three inches away from my face, while Great British Bake-Off played in the background.
The game isn’t especially scary — though you’ll hear plenty of shrieks, wails, and cries of “Don’t leave me! Please, don’t leave me!” as you roleplay your way through Neverwinter, a walled city under siege by a horrifying plague with no easily discernible cause. The sickness doesn’t spread through physical contact, and even those under quarantine have managed to contract the disease.
As a newly graduated member of the city guard, you are tasked with helping the powerful paladin, Aribeth, collect the ingredients for the cure. As the game begins, Aribeth has rounded up the cryptids whose bodies house the required ingredients. But, a mysterious and coordinated strike against the city scatters the creatures across four of Neverwinter’s districts. Your journey will take you through a prison now ruled by the inmates, the city docks**, the Blacklake District** and the Beggars Nest — a poor district beset by a horde of zombies shambling in from the neighboring cemetery.
**I haven’t visited these areas yet. This game is big — this version includes the main campaign, two lengthy expansions, and various player-created modules — and, I’ve tried to sample some of everything it has to offer.
If you’re anything like me, that set-up is relentlessly interesting. I missed Neverwinter Nights when it first released back in 2002 (I was eight), so the appeal of playing through that story, that takes players on a quest, not through high fantasy plains and mountains, but through the socioeconomic strata of a city in crisis was really exciting to me. The idea of doing it on a portable system was especially appealing. And, there’s a lot here to be excited about!
That said, if your entry point to the RPG has been the modern offerings from Bethesda, CD Projekt Red or even BioWare, you’ll need to plan to do plenty of work to get the most out of Neverwinter Nights. In 2019, this RPG, which was “mainstream” for its time, may require a wiki to enjoy.
Combat, its pacing and its execution, is especially tricky. Pacing is a pain point because Neverwinter Nights offers very few opportunities to grind, but seems to expect it. In one dungeon in the Shadows of Undrentide expansion, I went from being at equivalent levels with the enemies I was facing, to vastly underleveled for the bosses. This may be intentional — designed then, and retained now, to push players to seek out multiplayer companions — but for me, someone who is mostly interested in playing this game by myself, it’s a bummer. And, given that enemies don’t respawn after you defeat them, grinding the levels isn’t really an option.
Even if it was, combat is the least enjoyable part of Neverwinter Nights, so I’m not itching to seek out more of it. After 25 hours, I still haven’t gotten to a place where I feel comfortable with the game’s pause-and-play system. Generally, I think it just feels antiquated. The game’s devotion to its Dungeons and Dragons source material means that you’ll frequently miss point-blank hits, even on easy, because a die roll says so. I understand why BioWare, and other developers of turn-of-the-century CRPGs, opted for this system. The semi-real time, semi-turn-based combat was a good fit for online play in an era of spotty Internet connections. But, today, it feels like a chore; neither as satisfyingly tactical as the system Larian used for the Divinity Original Sin games, or as responsive as the clicks in an action RPG like Diablo. Being old and out-of-style doesn’t make a mechanic bad. Recent throwback shooters Dusk and Ion Fury each resurrected the 90s FPS’ story-lite blasting to great effect! But… the combat here feels like a compromise designed to address a problem that no longer exists.
That said, Beamdog has done an excellent job faithfully porting this game to Switch. The developer has been tasked with bringing an era of D and D games to consoles — Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment all also came to Switch this year thanks to the company’s efforts — and has succeeded admirably. The current streaming-fueled Dungeons and Dragons renaissance, plus the success of Pillars of Eternity, the Divinity Original Sin games and Disco Eysium have all helped bring the isometric RPG back into prominence. And now, thanks to Beamdog, some of the genre’s most important classics are available on every major platform. That’s a really cool, important achievement.
Especially given the fact Beamdog has put in the work to make Neverwinter Nights a great fit for consoles. While the original game featured an entirely isometric perspective, the Enhanced Edition allows you to control your adventurer from a third-person perspective. You can still use the pulled-back perspective to see more of the play space and queue up actions. But, most of the time, the game looks like a low-poly version of a modern console RPG.
The transition isn’t always entirely smooth. I ran into a progress-blocking bug early on — I walked up to a table toward the end of the tutorial area, got stuck inside of it and couldn’t escape its geometry without starting the game over — that pushed me to save scum the hell out of the rest of my time with the game. I ran into a similar issue later, getting stuck at the entrance*** to a laboratory in Shadows of Undrentide, and had to abandon the save and 30 minutes of progress. Neither of these issues ruined my experience with the game. But, both, combined with the game’s old-fashioned save system, pushed me to play it extremely careful. I saved after every combat encounter for fear of losing progress.
***Doors are generally just pretty weird. I often walked out of a door — one specifically in the main game’s City Core area was a persistent problem — only to re-enter the building I was walking away from.
All those issues aside, I’ve mostly enjoyed my time with Neverwinter Nights and plan to play more! There’s a massive amount of content included here, bolstered by an interesting setting and evocative writing. I’ll likely spend a lot of time with it over the holidays.
But, I’ll probably spend just as much time on a wiki.
Neverwinter Nights review code for Nintendo Switch provided by the publisher.
Neverwinter Nights is out on PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
Reviews
‘The Mouths’ Review: Takashi Shimizu’s Cursed Tree Horror Stumbles at the Finish [Fantasia 2026]
Director Takashi Shimizu’s latest, The Mouths, has a pretty straightforward premise: what if an enormous, threatening tree at the edge of a cemetery contained a killer curse? Touch it, make a wish, and let the horror begin.
As fans of Shimizu’s work know, it’s never quite so straightforward. The Japanese director, best known for the Ju-on films, delights in non-linear narratives and haunting specters. In this capacity, The Mouths more or less adheres to formula.
The screenplay was written by Masahiro Yamaura and adapts Sesuji’s novella A Questionnaire About the Mouth. The source material provides a framing device that opens the film before it is swiftly forgotten, only to return in the film’s closing moments in highly amusing fashion.
In between, the film tells the story of four friends who investigate an urban legend of a cursed tree, including soft-spoken Shota (Rihito Itagaki), sensitive Mirei (Momona Kasahara), outgoing Ann (Ai Yoshikawa), and her boastful boyfriend Tatsuya (Keito Tsuna).
Initially, the action seems straightforward: the four teens drive to the cemetery, discussing what Shota heard about the tree with a brief pause at a convenience store in between. Throughout all of these early scenes, the interaction among the teens hints at a complicated dynamic, including a minor spat between Ann and Tatsuya, and Shota’s brief but meaningful glance at Ann in the rearview mirror. These sequences are regularly interrupted by direct address police interviews as present-day Shota, Tatsuya, and Mirei make ominous declarations about the events of that evening.
The first act works because The Mouths is slowly building tension around what happened. It’s obvious from their statements that things will go awry, but Yamaura’s script teases things out. Even when they arrive at the cemetery, rather than proceed directly to the cursed object, the action pauses so Shota can propose a specific course of action: they will proceed to the tree, individually, in a specific order. The wait for the action to kick in is both tantalizing and agonizing.
First up: Shota, followed by Tatsuya, then Ann. Mirei, meanwhile, becomes increasingly reticent, which alarms the others who have already noted her sensitivity to otherworldly phenomena.
When Ann disappears, the film moves into a new act as the remaining members of the group search for her while seemingly being haunted by both her and the tree. This is where Shimizu’s penchant for ghostly figures lurking in the background and peeking around corners comes to the forefront, including one stand-out moment that leans into the curse’s origin: the visual of a hanged woman with a grotesquely stretched neck.
The middle stretch feels a little too familiar to the director’s work, however, so it’s exciting when the last act upends much of what we thought we knew. There is a reason that the film is called The Mouths: not only are most of these people revealed to be unreliable narrators, but it is revealed that several interactions throughout the film were manipulated by characters with malicious intent. These people are not quite what they seemed.
This revisionist filter on the events of the movie’s first half is provocative and enticing, though the creative team struggles to execute it without devolving into messy confusion. There’s at least one plot beat that should be a massive revelation, but both the visuals and the dialogue render it quite confusing, which robs the moment of some of its power. This is a shame, because the last act is what makes the film stand out from other curse/ghost movies.
The performances of the main four teens are solid, with Itagaki getting to show the most range. Many of the supporting characters, including a pair of frenemies who also become involved in the curse, as well as the detective investigating the case, feel a bit superfluous; the film would have benefitted from cutting back some of these scenes or, alternately, beefing up a few of these roles to justify their inclusion.
The Mouths’ other big element is its sound design. The area around the tree is surrounded by wet mud that slurps and sucks at shoes, while the cursed bark is covered in cicadas, whose distinctive buzz and crunchy shells provide evocative foley.
Overall, The Mouths is a solid but slightly inessential addition to Shimizu’s filmography. For the auteur’s fans, there’s plenty to appreciate, particularly the way the Japanese master sets up scares and pays them off, including good moments in a library and later when the detective is driving. On the other hand, the film’s big reveal is handled so clumsily that its potency is disappointingly muted.
The Mouths is a decent time, but it’s hard to overlook some of its weaknesses.
The Mouths made its North American premiere at the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival. Release info TBD.
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