With rumours suggesting that Switch 2 might not be launching until sometime after March 2025, you might be looking to fill the time while you wait for the next Nintendo hotness. Fortunately, there are plenty of very big, very long games on Switch if you’re a time-rich gamer.
Sometimes you just want a quick hit of video game goodness to fill a half-hour gap in your schedule, but others you want to sit back and luxuriate in an absorbing world for hours on end. Fortunately, Switch caters to gamers on both ends of the spectrum, whether you’re after a brief amuse-bouche or a 12-course blow-out meal with all the trimmings. Today, we’re looking at the latter.
That’s right, we’re here to sort through a selection of the 36 biggest, longest Switch games — more specifically, the 36 biggest, longest Switch games that are actually good. There are plenty of games you could sink hundreds of hours into, but decidedly fewer that you’ll come away from feeling that that was time well spent. We’ve reviewed every long Switch game on the list below they’ve all scored at least 8/10.
All the hour counts included here come from How Long To Beat, the community poll site that gathers playtime data from its users to give new players a good idea of how much time they’ll need to devote to a game before rolling credits. While they have various averaged totals, including times for mainlining the campaign and 100% completion, we’ve based this list on the Main + Sides/Extra totals. So, to put that in Breath of the Wild terms, you’ve done all the mainline and side quests, but you haven’t gone completion-crazy and collected all 900 Korok seeds.
The number of users who have submitted stats varies per game, so it’s worth keeping a pinch of salt handy and not treating the stated hour count as gospel — everyone has their own pace, of course, so think of them as a rough guide. We’ve also eliminated F2P, live-service games, and other titles which feel like they could go on almost indefinitely due to their daily check-in structure. Can you ever really ‘finish’ Animal Crossing?
Enough preamble — let’s get into the amble itself and take a look at our picks of the best long games on Switch. We start with the, er, shortest long game of the 36…
Main + Sides: 76 Hours
We kick things off with Intelligent Systems’ Three Houses. If 76 hours of quality first-party strategy and study at the Garegg Mach Monastery isn’t enough for you, there’s the 8-ish hours of Cindered Shadows DLC, too.
And if that isn’t enough, you can always play through again with another house such as the Black Eagles/Blue Lions/Golden Deer (delete as applicable) to become a 210-hour ‘Completionist’. That sounds like a recipe for turn-based battling burnout to us, but each to their own. It is a great game.
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Main + Sides: 77 Hours
With all the updates Hello Games keeps adding to No Man’s Sky, 77 hours feels like a conservative estimate to us — and HLTB’s ‘Completionist’ hour count stands at 150 hours. Regardless, it’s a solid Switch port of an engrossing game offering a very pleasant galaxy to get lost in.
Main + Sides: 78 Hours
You can add another 30 hours if you want to totally 100% the Complete Edition of Obsidian’s Pillars Of Eternity, fighting your way through labyrinthian dungeons, exploring deserted Dwarven fortresses, becoming Lord of your very own stronghold, and undertaking quests as varied as they are beautifully-written and acted.
Main + Sides: 78 Hours
Monster Hunter Rise might have launched in the shadow of World on more powerful consoles, but it certainly didn’t feel like some scaled-down side story; instead, it’s one of the strongest entries into the franchise to date. As is customary for the series, there are hundreds of hours here if you’re determined to hunt every monster and get every weapon, not to mention the multiplayer expedition on offer. Throw in the Sunbreak expansion and it’ll more than double the amount of stuff to do. Good stuff it is, too. Nay, great stuff.
Main + Sides: 79½ Hours
Making your way through a single successful run of roguelite masterclass Spelunky 2 will take you something like 27 hours. But while surviving a single run might satisfy the time-poor among us, there’s so much more to dig into in the depths of Derek Yu’s fantastic sequel.
Main + Sides: 80½ Hours
If “80½ Hours” feels weirdly specific, it’s worth remembering that HLTB’s poll stats come from a large number of users (usually) across multiple platforms and that the exact average for this one is listed as 81 hours and 16 minutes. Which is 46 minutes longer, for some reason — an average between the mean and median averages, perhaps? It highlights the need to take all these stats with a pinch of salt, anyhow. Estimates take into account people who blitzed through like lightning and those who take a more meticulous approach. Like that one dedicated person who’s admirably put 135 hours into Fitness Boxing. Is that you, Shiryu?
Anyhow, where were we? Ah yes, Octopath Traveler. Good game. Long game.
Main + Sides: 80½ Hours
Tying with Octopath, Rune Factory 4 Special apparently takes fewer hours to complete than the 3DS non-special version — a sign of the Switch release’s quality-of-life updates, perhaps. Or that all those who played the original also played special and knew exactly what they were doing this time around. Probably the former, though.
Main + Sides: 81 Hours
Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town serves up dozens of hours of farm-sim goodness. In fact, we’re surprised the stats aren’t absolutely crawling with nothing but time-sink farm sims. Four ‘Completionists’ averaged a whopping 246 hours on this one, so plenty of scope here if gruelling farmwork is your go-to.
Main + Sides: 81½ Hours
Available on Switch in a bundle with the first game, Baldur’s Gate 2: Enhanced Edition is an RPG classic that plays beautifully on Switch, and you could argue that there’s no other console more convenient for spending dozens of hours in its company.
Main + Sides: 82½ Hours
Clocking in a little longer than the original, Octopath Traveler II delivers another eight-pathed epic to lose yourself in for a week of 12-hour days. It got a little forgotten in the GOTY 2023 crowd having released in February that year, but it’s absolutely worth checking out.
Gavin first wrote for Nintendo Life in 2018 before joining the site full-time the following year, rising through the ranks to become Editor. He can currently be found squashed beneath a Switch backlog the size of Normandy.
