Mr. Shifty is an action game all about clipping through walls with as much style and speed as possible. Players of the Nintendo Switch version are having trouble doing that, however, due to some severe framerate issues.
The video above shows how much the game slows down during some of its more intense fights. Some of that slowdown is annoying but manageable; sometimes, it can kill you. The game’s unique physics are tied directly to its framerate, so any drops can have a serious effect on gameplay.
When Nintendo Switch owners reached out to developer Team Shifty about the issue, the studio’s response was flippant.
“We’re doing what we can,” Team Shifty wrote on Twitter. “It’s still early on the platform. Remember that even Zelda stutters.”
When a user replied that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s framerate has vastly improved since launch, the studio pinned the issue on the Unity Engine’s inconsistent performance on Nintendo Switch thus far.
“We’re also a very small team,” Team Shifty added. “Compromise the experience by cutting stuff out or drop frames, we chose the latter.”
Here’s the tweet that really stoked the flames for Nintendo Switch fans, though:
@BruiserBear76 There's always the Steam version ;)
— Team Shifty (@teamshiftygames) April 11, 2017
When that same user reiterated that Mr. Shifty’s frequent stutters was disappointing, the studio instead pointed them toward the more stable Windows PC version.
This led Alex Nichiporchik, CEO of the game’s publisher TinyBuild, to step in after an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit with Team Shifty failed to clear the air. As the team continued to talk around the idea of patching the game, Nichiporchik promised otherwise. He explained the cause of the problem — that when you take “a brand new platform with brand new development tools and a 3rd party engine,” you’re asking for trouble — and said that both TinyBuild and Team Shifty are now looking out for these slowdown issues to fix them in a patch.
“I'm just very sorry that the stress on everyone involved created this situation,” Nichiporchik wrote on the Nintendo Switch subreddit. “Some things were said that shouldn't have been, and we didn’t do a good job with communicating here. I hope this post brings some context to what’s going on.”
To see how Mr. Shifty is supposed to look when it isn’t running on a stuttering Switch, watch us play it below.