With its larger, brighter display and array of useful updates, this sleek new version of the Switch is expensive but desirable
I will be for ever grateful to the Nintendo Switch for saving my sanity during the two most trying periods of my life: my first year of parenthood, during which I learned to breastfeed lying down so that I could sneak extra hours of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule; and basically all of 2020, during which I was dealing with a pandemic, a six-month-old baby and a three-year-old, and Animal Crossing was the only thing that kept me from losing my entire mind.
After four and a half years, though, the brilliant hybrid on-the-go-and-living-room console is getting long in the tooth. The Switch Lite, released in September 2019, wasn’t so much an upgrade as a stripped-down redesign: lighter, simpler, made for playing on the bus or in bed. And it lacked the Switch’s two most elegant features: you couldn’t play it on a TV, and you couldn’t snap off a controller to hand to a friend for a pub round of Mario Kart.