Why Snipperclips is unlikely to make you any good at arts and crafts
Snipperclips Plus: Cut It Out, Together! (2017)
Snipperclips Plus: Cut It Out, Together! (2017)
The early days of a new gaming console can often be slim pickings, as anyone who bought a Nintendo 64 in the early days will attest. But, for all the zillions it sold, it was tough to get some use out of your Switch in the early days, after you’d slammed 150 hours into Breath of the Wild.
Fortunately for us, games are available for online download these days, something to help stop the Switch from becoming the fanciest paperweight of 2017. I wasn’t altogether interested in a Pokémon Tekken game, and Bomberman and Street Fighter 2 were extremely played out. 1-2-Switch never entered the equation - talk about a total waste of money. The only other game I could see that might have been worth a hoot, was a cute little game called Snipperclips.
Even the cover art of Snipperclips reminded me of the bad old days of arts and crafts in school. Whenever the teacher smiled at us all and it came time to put away the monotonous books, there was usually a jubilant cheer from the class – but an unspoken rumble of fear from me.
I mean it. Every artistic venture I have ever embarked upon has had devastating effects, potentially fatal to those who witness it. I know everyone says “I can’t draw”, but I can’t draw. I can’t draw or craft or make or create or assemble or design.
Being left-handed, I could never use the scissors properly, and God help me whenever I had a paintbrush in my hands – I’d sort of awkwardly tickle the canvas and wonder why my desired shades of Sunshine Yellow and Warm Viridian came out a fetching hue of Stale Urine and Coagulated Bile. And because I couldn’t even get the basic colours right, the rest of the piece sort of raced beyond what you might call ‘avant-garde’, even further past ‘modern art’ and finally came to a shuddering halt at ‘clag’.
My end result would go on display for the whole class to see. Inevitably, everybody else would have followed the instructions perfectly and gotten a result almost as good as the teacher’s. I’d finish up with an absolute mess and, in the vein of a furious Severus Snape throwing Harry Potter a withering look and giving him yet another verbal lashing, the teacher’s lip would quiver.
They’d then come out with some back-handed compliment. Well, you managed to get most of the colours within the lines this time, Burkey. You didn’t mix any of the paints into your Capri Sun by mistake. Or, at least you didn’t take anyone’s eye out when you started wielding that scissors. That sort of thing.
I do wish I had that artistic streak. In the twelve hours of college I attended, I would find myself sat alongside like-minded slackers. As the hippy lecturer droned on and tried to bring dated PowerPoint slides to life, sooner or later we’d just begin doodling in our notepads. But what represented a doodle to my classmates was a majestic, sweeping Chinese dragon, or a stunning, sunlit valley backdrop.
What represented a doodle to me was a highly crude theatre of war, where hordes of classic stickmen would hurriedly parachute into battle to fight badly-drawn tanks, to the amusement of the M-shaped seagulls and sunglasses-wearing sun in the completely-out-of-perspective sky above. A similar scene was to be found in probably all of my schoolbooks from a very young age.
Do you see what I mean? Years of practice and I still couldn’t put together a good drawing, much less the panoramas that my peers were capable of, without them even trying. No, it wasn’t for me. Give me the academia and the stats and the boring figures and long-winded paragraphs.
When it comes to creativity, if I can’t draw it on the back of a fag packet, then I don’t want to know. Puzzle solving, that’s what I’m all about. Lateral thinking, all that stuff. Well, not quite the cryptic crossword, but I’ll tell you one thing – I’ll never be able to draw a face that doesn’t look like it came out of 1960s Doctor Who.
Which of my fancies was Snipperclips to tickle? The creative artsy side, or the objective thinking side? Considering you literally play as stationery, I was pretty fearful to start off with. But I needn’t have worried because Snips is worthy of the moderate amount of hype it received when it came out early in the Switch’s life.
In fact, I liked the game so much that I later bought the slightly expanded, physical version, called Snipperclips Plus. That’s right, I can make financial purchases now, because I’m a big boy who no longer threatens people’s eyes with scissors. I don’t drink PVA glue anymore either.
That’s the other great thing about Plus – it’s delightfully physical, which isn’t always a given in this day and age. Although I was half-expecting a load of mocking stickers and papercraft doohickeys to come spilling out of the box when I opened it. A sort of final middle finger from the game designers, as if to tell me, “Lad, we all saw your performances in arts and crafts when you were in school – better hope you kept the receipt because you don’t deserve us”.
Co-op gameplay is at its best when it’s accessible, and that’s where this game excels, because all you need is a Joy-Con each. Playing Snipperclips alone is probably sanctionable by law, so think of this strictly as a co-op game where you play as two bits of paper that can cut one another into various shapes.
You will need to work together to cut yourself into the correct shapes. From there, you both complete all manner of nitwit puzzles, and it’s here where the other side of co-op play rears its ugly head – the arguments.
Your co-op partner for Snips may be your brother, your mother, your best pal, or your soul mate. But when they let the drawbridge contraption drop at the wrong time or knock the ball into the wrong hole or even cut you the wrong way, you better believe there’ll be bickering. Great stuff, I say.
You can’t really lose either, you can just sit there as long as you need and have your head melted by the puzzles. There’s no difficulty that isn’t overcome by having half a brain. There’s even a load of clever other modes, basketball and all that, where you can take your frustrations out on your buddy by beating them head-to-head. At just thirty Euro or Dollars or Drachmas, it’s packed with a lot of content, and there’s really no other game out there like it.
Anyone can play, and you don’t even have to adopt the classic Joy-Con clawhand to maneuver your odd little face-making paper creature through the puzzles, or at least you won’t have to do it often. The Switch has amassed a reputation as a wonderful machine for indie titles, aided by its supreme portability, and Snipperclips is one of the flagship indies here as far as I’m concerned.
It may not be a bazillion seller, it may not be graphically cutting edge, and even the sound, the graphics and yes, the design, aren’t top notch. But at a great price, this is a game that’s absolutely perfect for the Switch, and I can give it no higher praise than that. That’s the conclusion I draw, anyway. Which is about the only thing I can draw, as it goes.
2 June 2023