You’d think with over 4,000 indie games played and reviewed on the Switch that I would have pretty well seen everything by now, but on a regular basis that theory is proven quite wrong. While perhaps most of the deviations from the established norm have been relatively humble, there absolutely have been those titles that have taken bigger swings at originality. In the case of Nico Saves The State, I do applaud the concept of mixing a more traditional action platformer with a variety of conditions that you’re able to save for later use, helping you to essentially work out a variety of puzzles. I just wish that it all worked more smoothly.

With a gang of ne'er-do-wells attacking the city, a brilliant scientist and his assistant determine themselves to help out. The trick is, instead of using brawn to take down these villains, the plan is to instead overcome them using brains and some inventive devices. Arming yourself with a small variety of tools in your Statephone, you’ll be able to do things like clone items, teleport back to a location, absorb kinetic energy, and more. Your mission will be to complete a series of stages, denying these ruffians the power crystals they’re hoping to steal in order to liberate their boss from prison.

In theory, there’s absolutely an opportunity here for some innovative stage design and play, but there’s no question that the game struggles on a few fronts. The first is simply in succinctly and clearly communicating the ideas in the game to the player, and honestly it gets off to a rough start and can be a bit overwhelming. The second issue, exacerbated a bit by the first, is that trying to first trigger and then use your abilities is clunky where the controls are concerned. There’s quite a bit to manage, and it can get you fumbled up a bit trying to set up two different abilities and use them. That then leads into a third issue, which I consider an odd self-own to a degree, and that’s the odd need to make dealing with enemies harder than feels necessary. While you can temporarily knock them out, within a few moments they’ll pop right back up, and that feels like a very odd choice since it adds to the complications of being effective on the puzzle side of things.

The end result is a bit of an aggravating mess, despite what could be a decent core idea beneath it all. Whether by streamlining your abilities more, making them limited to the current level, or simply overhauling the controls completely, there feels like quite a bit of room for improvement here. If you’re patient and don’t mind a lot of frustrating needless deaths you can certainly muscle through it all, but the return of rewards for success feel insufficient compared to the effort expended in this case.