You may have heard of Bulb Boy. It’s an off-beat little indie horror game originally released via Steam back in 2015. It was fairly well-received at the time. So why am I talking about a game from two years ago? Because it was recently ported over to the Nintendo Switch. The Switch, five months out from launch, is still pretty starved for games of any sort, and especially horror games. So let’s take a look at this new old game.

Bulb Boy is the charmingly creepy story of a boy with a lightbulb for a head. This isn’t an Edward Scissorhands type scenario, though. All of the “people” that we see in this game have varying sorts of lighting fixtures for heads. Bulb Boy lives with his grandfather and flying dog. One night, something comes and blocks out the moon, and then Bulb Boy must navigate through his house which is now filled with all sorts of monsters. Aside from the quirky setting, the story is a pretty standard affair.

Bulb Boy looks fantastic. It has this grotesque-yet-cutesy kind of visual style, much like The Binding of Isaac or the old cartoon Aaahh!!! Real Monsters. While a lot of things in this game border on the incredibly gruesome (or, in one case, incredibly scatological) the art style makes sure that things never get more disturbing than something you’d find on a Halloween special on Cartoon Network. There’s also something particularly interesting going on with the lighting in this game. Since the player character is literally a source of illumination, the game’s lighting moves with him, or more specifically it moves with his head which can occasionally be detached. It’s not anything particularly ground breaking, but it’s a really nice bit of attention to detail for a smaller game like this.

I like the way that Bulb Boy handles its’ characters’ dialogue. The characters have “voices” but those voices are actually just noises with each character making noise at a different pitch, while the actual meaning is conveyed in pictograms in speech bubbles. The sound effects definitely match with the game’s incredibly cartoony aesthetic and to great success; you could probably tell exactly what is going on in the game without looking at it, just based on the sound effects. The soundtrack doesn’t quite mesh with that cartoonish vibe that the rest of the game has, though. Instead, it sounds like off-kilter carnival music. I think that this is a great choice because it highlights the uneasiness at the game’s core, as if reminding the player that despite the cutesy appearance there is still something horrible afoot.

Unfortunately the actual gameplay of Bulb Boy fails to live up to the quality of the game’s presentation. Perhaps it played better on its original PC release back in 2015, but the port on the Nintendo Switch handles incredibly sluggishly. Bulb Boy moves as though he’s trying to run through mud. Perhaps even worse is that the game is very finnicky about button presses to interact with things. Instead of simply pressing a button and interacting, the player must briefly hold the button down. This is a terrible decision. It is also very obvious that this game was designed to be played with a mouse instead of the joycon set up of the Switch.

Bulb Boy is definitely a charming little game. It’s got so much style that it practically oozes out of the console. However, actually playing the game isn’t terribly fun. I’d advise sticking to the original PC release if you want to play this game.