The Nintendo Switch is one of the worst consoles for mouse and keyboard gamers, but at the same time, its portability makes it especially appealing to those that already have a large, expensive gaming machine in their house. PC players might buy a Switch just to have something to play while traveling, only to realize that they hate using a gamepad.
While the Switch has no native support for mouse and little native support for keyboard inputs, players can use a USB-C to OTG cable to insert their own peripheries or buy one of the many sets explicitly made for the Switch. Either way, software support is very limited, and it doesn’t seem likely that Nintendo will focus on this issue in the immediate future (if ever). What’s arguably even worse, many games do support some alternative input methods, but rarely announce this.
6 Factorio
Factorio, a simulator game, is the exact kind of game that needs a mouse to be played comfortably. Luckily, as the developer himself confirmed on Reddit, the game has kept some of the mouse and keyboard support when it was ported to Nintendo Switch. In the same post, he added that he wishes to add a “proper mouse and keyboard mode” in the future, though it’s unclear when that might be.
Factorio on Switch supports mouse-as-cursor, shortcuts mappings (all shortcuts have to be associated manually), and of course keyboard input in the menus and the search box. The movement currently doesn’t support keyboard and mouse input, though fans speculate that it might be part of a hypothetical, fully fledged, keyboard and mouse mode.
5 Game Builder Garage
The self-defined “programming game” for the Nintendo Switch mentions mouse controls right on its website. The addition is almost obligatory for this game/game engine hybrid, although the similar, more popular Mario Maker 2 still doesn’t have access to this alternative control scheme.
It’s important to note that, while Game Builder Garage’s website lists only mouse support, the game supports keyboards too. Most Switch games that have search boxes or chat systems support keyboard inputs natively. Keyboard input might come especially handy in Game Builder Garage, since playing or sharing a custom-made level requires typing out a 10 characters-long code.
4 Doom 1 & Doom 2
id Software’s classic shooter is famous for its ports, playable seemingly on every platform that carries a screen and a CPU. In 2019, the ninth console generation joined literally every other console, as well as a slew of calculators, smartwatches, and voting machines, in being able to play Doom. What’s really surprising is that the Nintendo Switch can play Doom better than some older-generation consoles.
Doom on Nintendo Switch got the all-too-rare treatment of proper keyboard support, even if mouse input isn’t currently available. Oddly enough, this might bring modern players to experience Doom 1 and Doom 2 like most players did back in 1993: keyboard only and no strafing, no side movement. Even if this wasn’t really how the game was meant to be played, as revealed by the too fast “par times” displayed after every level, keyboard only was still the default way to play PC games back in Doom’s days
3 Quake
Quake is one of the very few shooters on the Nintendo Switch to natively support both mouse and keyboard input. This alternative control scheme was granted official support only with the game’s first major update. The same update brought to consoles the mission packs Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity, as well as a few quality-of-life features.
Quake might have received mouse and keyboard support due to the influence that the game had in making the mouse the default first-person shooter periphery, back in the late 90s. Even though most console players can aim with a controller well enough, part of the joy of revisiting these landmarks of gaming is in trying to understand how they appeared on release day. For Quake, that includes its innovative control scheme.
2 Hypnospace Outlaw
1990s internet simulator Hypnospace Outlaw is another game that thrives when played with mouse and keyboard. Luckily, the 2020 Switch port boosts complete support for this alternate control scheme. It's good news for the Switch owners that missed on 2019’s indie hit and want to completely immerse themselves in this weird little time piece about web 1.0.
As far as Mike Rose of game publisher No More Robots has it, Nintendo itself asked the Hypnospace Outlaw team to add mouse support to the Switch port of the game. Perhaps Nintendo anticipated how unwieldy a game about navigating the internet would be without mouse controls. Worse even than playing a point and click with a joystick, Hypnospace Outlaw without a mouse would be like loading Microsoft Excel directly on a PS5.
1 Tactics Ogre: Reborn
This remake of the classic tactics RPG Tactics Ogre has received a few quality-of-life improvements when compared to its two previous iterations, the SNES original and its PSP remaster. Despite being based on a game made for gamepad, Tactics Ogre: Reborn is still a tactics game and, like the rest the genre, it benefits immensely from being played with a mouse.
Unlike most other games on Switch, including the few others that do support mouse and keyboard, this alternative control scheme can replicate that of a PC almost one to one. What’s even more curious is that this feature was never announced by Square Enix and even went unnoticed for the first couple of days following release.