Demonschool and Big Walk Prove Switch 2 Is the Cozy Tactics Machine

Eurogamer’s weekly What We’ve Been Playing column rarely doubles as a handheld buying guide, but this week’s edition is dangerously close. The two headline games — Necrosoft’s tactics RPG Demonschool and Panic’s co-op stroll Big Walk — are both being played on Switch 2, and both are built around the exact rhythms portable players live by: short sessions, clear feedback loops, and no demand that you free up an entire evening.

Even the fighting game on the list, Marvel Tokon on PS5, comes with a handheld-relevant caveat: Connor turned off crossplay to avoid PC players. Online fighters still create a different kind of session commitment than the rest of this list, which is precisely why Demonschool and Big Walk stand out for anyone gaming between stops.

Demonschool’s Combo Chasing Is a Commuter’s Dream

Bertie’s enthusiasm for Demonschool starts with how effortless it is to get into: upbeat dialogue, expressive talking-head portraits, and a grid-based combat system that’s less about slow attrition and more about herding enemies into combo chains — “a lot like Fights in Tight Spaces,” he notes. That clarity is everything on a handheld. Tactics games live and die by how quickly you can parse the board, and on a smaller screen, the last thing you need is a wall of dense menus and minute-long animations between decisions.

There’s no word yet on performance targets for Switch 2, but Demonschool’s 2D presentation and turn-based logic make it hard to imagine the hardware breaking a sweat. The unvoiced dialogue, meanwhile, is a genuine commute win: you can play with sound off and lose almost nothing, which is more than most games can claim.

Big Walk Treats the Lunch-Break Session With Respect

Kelsey’s write-up of Big Walk — the proximity-chat co-op that’s secretly a predator game on Switch 2 — reads like a case study in why cozy co-op thrives on Switch 2. A sore arm forces short bursts, and Big Walk accommodates them without padding or punishment: it’s about communicating with friends, solving tactile puzzles, and being carried through the wilderness by your party. That’s a game that slots perfectly into a suspended sleep mode — one puzzle now, another after dinner.

It also helps that Big Walk’s vibe — the COVID-era friendslop game handhelds deserve — survives compression to a handheld screen. A twinkly soundtrack and slow, gentle traversal don’t need a huge display or max settings to land; what they need is reliable pacing, and Switch 2 is built for exactly that.

Hades 2 and Slay the Spire 2 Remain the Session-Size Champions

Tucked into the column is a sentence that every handheld owner will recognize: “I’ve been chipping away at Slay the Spire 2 and Hades 2, as ever.” These two roguelikes are the permanent residents of the portable library, and for good reason — their runs fit neatly inside a commute, a lunch break, or the battery budget of any decent handheld. Slay the Spire 2’s turn-based card combat is undemanding hardware at 15W, and Hades 2’s loop is specifically built around incremental progress, where a single run’s failure still feels like forward momentum.

Eurogamer doesn’t offer performance numbers here, and it doesn’t need to. The genre itself is the argument: roguelikes make a gaming laptop feel like overkill and a handheld feel like the only machine you need. This week’s column just happened to prove the same point for tactics games and cozy co-ops too.