Review: Screencheat Unplugged (Nintendo Switch)

There aren’t many games quite like Screencheat Unplugged. It’s quirky, it’s colorful, and very unique. But after several play sessions, does it deliver a worthwhile multiplayer experience?

Screencheat Unplugged is first and foremost a multiplayer game. The game does feature a Time Trials mode and a solo player could play through some multiplayer modes with bots, but it’s most definitely meant to be played with a group.

The first mode we played was essentially a classic deathmatch–first to five kills in this case. There isn’t a lot of direction to the player on what to do but it becomes pretty obvious after a few seconds. For those who grew up in the era of Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64, you’ll be keenly aware of the concept of “screen-cheating”. This is where a player looks at another player’s screen in local multiplayer games. Sometimes it’s for a brief second to see where another player is located in a particular level. For Screencheat Unplugged, the entire game is built around this concept. What was once taboo in gaming circles is encouraged in this game. Each player is invisible so your entire well-being is reliant on watching other quadrants of the TV screen.

It’s a little jarring getting used to looking at everyone’s screen and I even felt myself thinking–this is wrong, I shouldn’t be screen-cheating! :) But once I got over my initial reluctance, it became a very unique way to play a first-person shooter. You might be wondering, how on earth do you play a game where everyone is invisible? That’s a good question! For this game, they break up each area of a level into four colors. This helps tremendously when determining where each player is hiding. Now, players can certainly stay in one spot, also called ‘camping’, but there are settings in the game related to countering this behavior. I found it to be more fun to play like I would a typical FPS like Quake–run and gun! It proved pretty fatal, but enjoyable. Each weapon in the game gives a particular ‘tell’ during gameplay. The blunderbuss leaves a smoking shell while the hobby horse leaves a trail of dust behind the player. Each of these can be useful in determining the position of an opposing player.

I enjoyed aspects of Screencheat, but it ultimately held levels, weapons, and modes back far too long. In the case where I played with some friends, most just opted to play as a ‘Guest’ rather than use a Switch profile. Each match we completed only had a minimal amount of XP awarded so we unlocked things very slowly. The first several rounds we could only play deathmatch and we all had to use blunderbusses. Maybe there was a better way to unlock these features but it was very slow going. The gameplay didn’t prove fun enough to keep playing for long periods of time. My friends and I would usually opt to play another multiplayer game before getting too far.

While certainly unique, Screencheat Unplugged just never quite hit that level of fun to keep me coming back for more. The fact that most modes and weapons are behind a slow grind to unlock means that most folks won’t see much of the game’s content. Ideally these types of games “hook” you in the first few rounds but I didn’t experience that in my play sessions with friends. Screencheat Unplugged has a lot of polish to it, but there isn’t a lot of incentive to keep players coming back.