Looking for a Switch game thats fun but requires little commitment

Four years? Sounds like you missed Animal Crossing: New Horizons. If Animal Crossing is your style of game, it starts off essentially ten minutes worth of "stuff" to do each day and gradually opens up from there. Plus, about 98% of the time you can just quit whenever.

I've gotten really into Balatro, a game where you're making poker hands from a standard deck of playing cards, and in between rounds, you can get Jokers, Tarot, and other modifiers that can alter your score and help you build a better deck. You can pick up and put down a run in the middle of 20 minutes as runs are generally a little longer than that, and the game is pretty easy to pick up and go with.

There are plenty of low commitment, low learning-curve games on the Switch, but without knowing your tastes it's kinda hard to narrow it down. What sort of games do you enjoy?

p.s. Random rec in the mean time: World of Goo 2 just came out. I haven't had a chance to play it yet myself, although I intend to since I loved the original. But I've watched a few people stream it, and it seemed solid, and easily playable in short spurts.

Peglin run based Roguelike, very low commitment. A full run takes about an hour, give or take and decisions are very limited and very easy.

Have you played Peggle? It's that, but a run based Roguelike. Easy to pick up and understand, some skill involved, but randomness plays a big factor; you can do a quick battle, which will take about 5 minutes, then it'll save and you can play something else or it's easy enough to suspend and come back to later. Very low commitment.

Give a look at Superluminal. I didn't play it on switch, but it's available there. It only takes a few sit-downs to play through. It's a puzzle game in a 3d world. I really recommend trying it. Great little story, too. It definitely has an indie vibe.

I'm going to suggest Super Smash Bros playing bots (starting at low level) or World of Light. You can get a couple of matches in each day with that level of time ability, and while you can spend a lot of time honing your abilities and getting really good at the game the basic idea is simple and it doesn't take long to get good enough to play casually. You can also play humans and the system should adjust to give you opponents at similar skill level - I'm just suggesting bot opponents to maximise your ability to just turn off and walk away when you need to.

Looking through my collection, here are my suggestions:

• Stardew Valley: This can be a chill relaxing game or it can be a stressful time management game; if you're a min/maxer by nature then you'll probably want to skip it. Anyway, you've probably heard of it, but it's a farming life sim where you have a lot of options as for what to do with your time. You can grow crops, raise animals, forage for various items, fish (ok, this minigame does have a learning curve), go to the mines where you hit rocks and also fight monsters, or just wander around making friends with the townspeople. You can only save at the end of each day, but if you're playing it on the Switch, you can always just put it into rest mode when you're done playing. However, if you want to use the hard save each time: If you go to bed at 2am (though I suggest trying to aim for before midnight) one full day will take about 14 minutes. If you go to bed before 8pm a day will take just under 10 minutes so you could do two days in a session, but practically speaking it's hard to manage your time like that because it's easy to underestimate how long it will take to run back to your house.
• Untitled Goose Game: Wander around a sleepy small village and wreak havoc as a goose. Pick up and put down whenever!
• Yoshi's Crafted World: Gentle sidescrolling platformer with an adorable aesthetic. There are extra collect-a-thon items you can ignore or gather as you choose. I can't remember how long a single level takes, but I think it can't be longer than 5-10 minutes unless you're trying to 100% it.

Any gaming history of what you enjoyed? Like my immediate thought would be 1st party Nintendo IPs as I feel Nintendo is the king of "fun for any skill level" game play. Something fun and charming like "Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker" or "Kirby and the Forgotten Land" which have short levels with easy learning curves. A step up in difficulty would be something like "Super Mario Bros Wonder" or "Super Mario 3D World" and even "Pikmin 4". If you want something chill, then Animal Crossing is great for that.

However, if you're OK with a higher difficulty ceiling (in terms of mechanics) but not a steep learning curve, Super Mario Odyssey is great as you don't need to master all the mechanics to enjoy the game but doing so does make the game more satisfying.

Non Nintendo games would be the like indie titles that have been ported over. A Short Hike, Inside, Limbo and arguably, GRIS.

Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

It's very fun, not difficult even on Hero mode, and won't make a difference if you put it down for 20 minutes or 6 months and then return where you left off. The switch is a great console for you, a majority of titles would fit your use case and often the learning curve and difficulty levels remain low.

A lot of great recommendations so far, In particular I'll echo Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Balatro.

Two others which I recommend as extremely easy to pick up and put down:

• Baba is You: puzzle game where the puzzle is literally manipulating the game's rules.
• Into the Breach: tactics style game with 100% information.

I like both for tight schedules because both can be pickuped for only a couple minutes and put back down. In fact they're tough enough that 20 minutes might be all you want to play in a sitting.

Also when it gets a Switch release: UFO 50.

Snipperclips is fun puzzles and very casual.

Dave the Diver! It's an absolute blast that you can play in small pieces. The game has a day night cycle where you go fishing during the day, and at night you run a sushi bar to sell things that you've caught.

You are time limited (your oxygen level underwater) with how long you can spend underwater, and there's a lot of off ramps to come up for air when you want to finish the day, or more oxygen tanks if you want to stay under longer.

There's several compelling story lines running in parallel like doing research, some underwater photography, general exploration, taking care of your cat, etc.

Spyro the dragon.

A couple random suggestions from me: Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda and Spelunky. Both are loads of fun and it's easy to start and stop both pretty quickly.

A full run of Spelunky takes more like 30-40 minutes, but sometimes you'll die after just a few minutes and will then be happy to move on with your life, having gotten your little video game kick and realized it wasn't your day for it, or you can just start again. And if no one else is playing your Switch, you can turn it off and pick up where you left off. It unfortunately doesn't have a save feature, so if you or someone else wants to play a different game, it'll kill your progress. But once you've played it enough, you won't get too attached to any one run, and starting over is no big deal.

Cadence of Hyrule is more of a full adventure game that you'll progress at each time you play rather than starting from scratch (though it does have modes where you start from scratch each time). You do end up feeling attached to each dungeon and may want to finish that in one session, but those are pretty short. Probably longer than 20 minutes, but there are also some clear 'break' points in the middle of them, so it wouldn't be hard to convince yourself to stop. The gameplay is lots of fun--you move your character to the beat and end up getting a sense for how each distinct enemy moves, figuring out how to move to counteract it. You collect traditional Zelda-style tools and use them for various simple puzzles.

My favorite game on the Switch is Wilmot's Warehouse. It starts off short & easy and then each play session ramps up. Not sure if they extend beyond 20 minutes at the end, but if you like organizing it's a very rewarding game

I think Grapple Dogs is the perfect sweet spot of easy to learn but with a high ceiling. The early levels do a great job of teaching the basic mechanics and the levels that follow build on and twist what you’ve learned, and it’s also extremely forgiving with plenty of checkpoints and few penalties. The physics are also very satisfying and you can reach a Sonic-like flow state that feels very rewarding. It also has a great sense of humor that made me laugh out loud several times. Grapple Dogs is the sequel to Grapple Dog, but it might be a better place to start because they made a lot of quality of life improvements over the first game, and it might even be a little easier too.

The Outer Wilds may fall into this category, though it can be a very frustration game. The mechanics are very simple and works on a 22min loop, so, right outside your target time.