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Key facts
- Cheapest right now
- € Standard · Account · Global · Key4Games
- Live offers
- 5 offers · 5 stores
- Our pick
- Standard · eShop Code · Europe · Gameboost — €
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The Switch is a very good machine for reading. Sessions can be short, you can play in bed or on the train, and the text sits a foot from your face. Picking something is the hard part. Steam's "Visual Novel" tag also ends up on fighting games and giant-robot strategy as long as there's enough dialogue, so we cleaned it up. From the games with that tag and a Switch page on Gocdkeys, we kept the ones you actually play by reading and making choices, plus a few story-heavy adventures that come close, then checked which had an offer worth mentioning this morning. Thirteen were left.
Review scores are Steam's, which means they're for the PC version; Nintendo doesn't publish player ratings. The last column is the cheapest account with fees, because that's the only kind of offer all thirteen have today. Right below the table we explain what that means, and when a code is the better buy.
| Game | What you do | Steam reviews (PC) | Cheapest account, with fees |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective | Save lives as a ghost | Overwhelmingly Positive, 97% (6,498) | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS15) |
| Ace Attorney Investigations Collection | Investigate as the prosecutor | Overwhelmingly Positive, 96% (3,445) | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS15) |
| Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy | Courtroom battles, three games | Very Positive, 88% (3,285) | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS15) |
| AI: The Somnium Files – nirvanA Initiative | A murder case and dream-diving | Very Positive, 86% (3,594) | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS15) |
| Beacon Pines | Rewrite a branching story | Overwhelmingly Positive, 97% (3,065) | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS15) |
| I Was a Teenage Exocolonist | Grow up on an alien planet | Overwhelmingly Positive, 96% (4,459) | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS15) |
| Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly | Make drinks, listen to customers | Overwhelmingly Positive, 96% (2,506) | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS15) |
| Tavern Talk | Serve drinks to adventurers | Very Positive, 87% (1,456) | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS15) |
| Venba | Cook a family's recipes | Very Positive, 93% (2,414) | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS15) |
| Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue | School romance and air races | Overwhelmingly Positive, 97% (5,098) | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS15) |
| Arcade Spirits | Romance in an arcade | Very Positive, 94% (439) | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS15) |
| Date Everything! | Date the furniture | Very Positive, 93% (6,693) | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS15) |
| Persona 3 Portable | JRPG with a school life | Very Positive, 81% (4,769) | € (with coupon GOCDKEYS15) |
Account, eShop code or cartridge
Switch pages on Gocdkeys mix three kinds of offer, and they aren't the same purchase:
- Account: the seller gives you the login for a Nintendo account that already owns the game. You play on that account, your own library stays as it was, and if the seller changes the password, you lose access. It's the cheapest option almost every time, and for eight of these thirteen games it's the only one.
- eShop code: you redeem it on your own Nintendo account and the game is yours for good. It has to match your account's region: a European code for a European account, a US code for a US one.
- Physical copy: a cartridge. Switch games aren't region-locked, so a US cartridge runs fine on a European console, and you can sell it on when you're done.
Five games on the list have a code or a cartridge in our price comparison today:
| Game | Format | Cheapest today, with fees |
|---|---|---|
| Arcade Spirits | eShop code (Europe) | € (with coupon GCDK13) |
| Persona 3 Portable | eShop code (Europe) | |
| Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue | eShop code (Europe) | € (with coupon GCDK13) |
| Ace Attorney Investigations Collection | eShop code (US) | |
| Ace Attorney Investigations Collection | Physical copy | |
| Tavern Talk | Physical copy | € |
Arcade Spirits barely needs thinking about. YUPLAY sells the European code for €3.20 (no fees), and the cheapest account, at Key4Games, is €2.16 with coupon GOCDKEYS15 (€2.51 with fees). That's 69 cents to have it on your own account, and Gameboost is a cent cheaper still: €3.04 with coupon GCDK13 (€3.19 with fees). Persona 3 Portable is a similar story: Instant Gaming has the European code at €16.99 (no fees), against €14.99 for Difmark's account (€15.66 with fees). Tavern Talk goes the other way. Its only physical copy, at Media Markt ES, costs €36.99 (no fees), while an account is €13.84 with fees.
Courtrooms, crime scenes and a ghost
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective was written and directed by Shu Takumi, the creator of Ace Attorney, and first came out on the Nintendo DS. You're Sissel, who wakes up dead, with no memory and one night to find out who killed him. As a ghost you can jump between nearby objects and move them, and when you find a body you can go back to four minutes before that person died and try to change what happens. It shares the top Steam score on this list with Aokana and Beacon Pines: Overwhelmingly Positive, 97% of 6,498 reviews. There's one offer today, a Difmark account at €19.35 (€20.22 with fees).
Ace Attorney Investigations Collection puts you on the other side of the courtroom. You play Miles Edgeworth, the prosecutor Phoenix Wright keeps beating, and most of the work happens at the crime scene: you examine it, connect the clues and take apart what witnesses and suspects tell you right there. The collection has both Investigations games, and the second had never been officially released outside Japan before. Overwhelmingly Positive, 96% of 3,445.
It also has the widest choice of formats. The lowest price is Kinguin's US eShop code, €13.65 with coupon JUNGOC10 (€15.09 with fees), but it only works on a US Nintendo account. For about the same money, HRKGame sells the US cartridge at €12.98 with coupon Gocdkeys12 (€15.15 with fees), and that plays on any Switch. Difmark's account is €17.99 (€18.80 with fees). These are the five cheapest offers right now on the page to buy Ace Attorney Investigations Collection key:
And how those stores score on Trustpilot:
- Difmark — 4.1 / 5 over 14,000+ reviews.
- G2A — 4.0 / 5 over 346,000+ reviews.
- Consogame — 3.4 / 5 over 2,000+ reviews.
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy brings together the fourth, fifth and sixth Ace Attorney games. Apollo Justice is the rookie defence lawyer, and Phoenix Wright is playable again in the last two. The routine is the series' usual one: investigate first, then pick testimony apart in court until something doesn't add up. Very Positive, 88% of 3,285. Accounts only, with Difmark's at €16.99 (€17.75 with fees).
Kotaro Uchikoshi, who wrote the Zero Escape games, is behind AI: The Somnium Files – nirvanA Initiative, the sequel to AI: The Somnium Files. It opens with a grim case: half of a body turns up, and six years later the other half is found, as if the victim had only just died. Two investigators, Ryuki and Mizuki, work it at two different points in time. The rest of the game takes place inside witnesses' dreams, the Somniums, where you have a few minutes to find out what they're hiding and every action eats into the clock. Very Positive, 86% of 3,594.
It's the most expensive game here, with a single offer: Difmark's account at €34.99 (€36.56 with fees). If you'd rather wait, set a price alert for AI: The Somnium Files – nirvanA Initiative and we'll email you when it drops.
Stories that branch where you decide
Beacon Pines is told like a children's picture book being read aloud, set in a small town full of animals, but it gets a lot darker than the drawings suggest. You follow Luka, and as you explore you collect charms, single words you slot into certain turning points to send the story down another branch. When a branch ends badly, you go back to the tree and try a different word. Overwhelmingly Positive, 97% of 3,065. The cheapest account is at Key4Games, €10.76 with GOCDKEYS15 (€11.50 with fees).
In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist you grow up in a human colony on an alien planet, from age ten to twenty. Each month you decide how to spend your time (studying, working, exploring outside the walls, hanging out with friends), and challenges play out as card games built from your memories. Then the story starts over. Each new life keeps part of what you knew, which opens up choices that weren't there the first time. Overwhelmingly Positive, 96% of 4,459. Difmark's account costs €19.99 (€20.89 with fees).
Behind the bar or at the stove
Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly puts you back behind the counter of a café that only opens at night, in a Seattle where humans live alongside elves, orcs, werewolves and the rest. You make drinks by combining ingredients, and mostly you listen; getting an order right is what moves each customer's story along. It's the calmest game of the thirteen and one of the best rated, Overwhelmingly Positive at 96% of 2,506. Difmark's account is €11.99 (€12.53 with fees).
Tavern Talk takes the same idea to a fantasy tavern. Your customers are adventurers, and what you pour them before they set off affects how their quest goes. Very Positive, 87% of 1,456. Key4Games has the cheapest account at €13.00 with GOCDKEYS15 (€13.84 with fees).
You'll finish Venba in an evening. It follows a Tamil family who move from India to Canada, and you play the mother, Venba. The puzzles happen in the kitchen: the family recipe book is damaged, and you have to rebuild each dish step by step. Very Positive, 93% of 2,414. Of the games sold only as accounts, it's the cheapest, at €9.99 from Difmark (€10.44 with fees).
Romance, school and some very odd dates
Aokana: Four Rhythms Across the Blue, by Sprite, is the most traditional Japanese visual novel in this guide. In its world, anti-gravity shoes let anyone fly, and the sport at school is Flying Circus, played in the air. Masaya, a former player who quit, ends up coaching a newcomer, Asuka, and from there the story splits into routes depending on the heroine. Overwhelmingly Positive, 97% of 5,098, level with Ghost Trick and Beacon Pines.
Difmark's account is €14.89 with coupon Gocdkeys (€15.56 with fees). Kinguin's European eShop code costs €17.99 with coupon JULGOC10 (€19.77 with fees), so around four euros more to have it on your own account.
Arcade Spirits, from Fiction Factory Games, is a romance visual novel set in a world where the video game crash of the eighties never happened and arcades are still packed. After a run of bad luck you take a job at one, and between shifts you get to know your coworkers and the regulars. You design your own character and choose who, if anyone, to fall for. It only has 439 Steam reviews, but 94% are positive (Very Positive). It's also the cheapest game here by a distance: the page to buy Arcade Spirits key lists eleven offers, nine of them European codes.
Date Everything! has the strangest premise of the lot. You work from home, a pair of glasses arrives, and once you put them on, the furniture, the appliances and almost every object in the house turn into characters you can date. There are more than a hundred of them, all voiced. Very Positive, 93% of 6,693. Difmark's account costs €22.99 (€24.02 with fees).
Persona 3 Portable is a JRPG, not a visual novel, but half of it plays like one. By day you're a transfer student going to class, joining clubs and building relationships with classmates and people around town (the Social Links). At midnight comes the Dark Hour, a hidden hour between one day and the next, and you climb Tartarus, a tower full of enemies, with your team. This version also lets you play as a female lead, which changes some of those relationships. Very Positive, 81% of 4,769, the lowest score on the list. As we said above, the European code at Instant Gaming (€16.99, no fees) costs only €1.33 more than the cheapest account.
Where we'd start
If you want it on your own account, start with Arcade Spirits: €3.20 (no fees) for YUPLAY's European code. The other code worth buying today is Persona 3 Portable's, at €16.99 (no fees). For a first visual novel with a really good story, we'd go with Ghost Trick, even though right now it's only sold as an account (€20.22 with fees). And if you're an Ace Attorney fan, look at the US cartridge of the Investigations Collection before anything else.
Prices checked on the morning of 12 October.
Buying guides and price comparisons written alongside live prices from the stores verified by GOCDKEYS.