Tokyo Scramble for Nintendo’s Switch 2 has an interesting premise. You play as Anne, a woman who is riding her usual commute on the Tokyo subway line when, all of a sudden, a massive natural disaster occurs. You find yourself submerged deep within the earth, hundreds of feet below the world you call home. Quickly, you realize that you’re not alone. There are dinosaurs who want to eat you, and they are everywhere.
It’s also worth mentioning that Anne is a complete idiot and apparently hasn’t heard of dinosaurs before. She decides to refer to them as Zinos because she’s just never even considered or heard of or ever heard anybody talk about dinosaurs. I guess she never saw Jurassic Park or saw fossils at a museum. This girl is among the dumbest protagonists I’ve seen in a video game in decades. She gives the Zinos unique names because she’s not familiar with terms like raptor. Anne refers to raptors as goblins, and that’s about all you need to know about her. But I’m getting ahead of myself… Tokyo Scramble is a complete mess.
Let’s start with the good: the dinosaurs are well-designed, and the overall sound work is pretty good. You’ve got your generic raptors (or goblins if you’re Anne) and they look how you’d imagine them to. But then you’ve got some more interesting creatures like these giant bats with equally giant ears. There are also these praying mantis-looking ones with huge horns on their heads and long, sharp blades for hands. Sound design is also quite good, but it’s not super interesting or standout; it’s just better than everything else on display. Every time I spotted a new dinosaur, it got a reaction out of me, and that’s all I can ask for.
Now let’s talk about my biggest issue with the game – the gameplay. That’s probably the one thing in your game you’d want to be the best, but unfortunately, it is Tokyo Scramble’s biggest issue. Anne doesn’t have any weapons or survival skills whatsoever. All she’s got is access to a smart watch and her good ol’ legs. For some reason, Anne decides to give everything a unique name, including her smart watch. She calls it Diana (who knows why?) and uses it to interact with machines and stuff underground to solve puzzles.
You can use Diana to flash the Zinos. That’s a crazy sentence, so let’s try that again. You can use Diana (your smart watch) to flash a blinding light at the dinosaurs via an app on the watch. That’s a way to get the creatures to reel back for a moment and completely lose track of you. But that only works if the light actually does what it’s supposed to do, because many times I would flash the Zinos only to have nothing happen, and then I get eaten. I should also mention that the Zinos will kill you instantly. You truly are defenceless in this underground arena. You will die constantly because the game is designed for a protagonist who has mobility and a weapon. Anne has neither, so playing as her in this game is insufferable and torturous.
Anne also uses her watch to read text messages from her terrible friends who don’t seem to give a fuck that she’s stuck deep in the earth’s core surrounded by subterranean monsters. Her friends are just constantly yapping about who they have a crush on, problems they have with your other friends, and other shit that just doesn’t matter. Also, I guess you guys are in a band, and it’s called Tokyo Scramble, hence the name of the game? It’s just insane and nonsensical.
Tokyo Scramble is a disaster of a video game that seriously makes me wonder how it even got greenlit. It plays like a Nintendo Wii shovelware game that you buy from a Walmart bargain bin for three dollars. Graphically, the game looks and runs like an old PS2 game, but it lacks the charm and whimsy of the classic terrible games from that era. Tokyo Scramble focuses more on drama between your friends than it does on making a gripping stealth video game. The enemy AI is so inconsistent and will react to your existence if you accidentally push over a pebble with your pinky toe.
We live in a time when so many incredible video games are released week after week. We are so lucky to be living in a world where you can spend $20 and get an amazing indie experience that will stay with you for weeks after you finish it. There are also many AAA games that are worth paying $79.99 because they respect your time and give you enough gameplay that warrants the price. Spending any money on Tokyo Scramble would just feel like pranking yourself and purposely wasting your money. I hope, and I pray, that Tokyo Scramble will be the worst game I play in 2026, because it would be a real shame if anything worse comes out in a year as good as this one.
