Review: Bad Cheese (Nintendo Switch)

Loosely inspired by the earliest era of cartoons, Bad Cheese is a psychological horror game that explores the lingering terror of childhood trauma. Almost the entire story takes place within the confines of your own home, a far from pleasant place to be.

You play as a young mouse who wakes up after your parents have already left for the day. You are tasked with a number of chores around the slovenly house, offering a glimpse into the darkness of family life. No parents who are genuinely invested in their child’s wellbeing would leave their home in the kind of condition you find as you explore.

Your core goal as you get through your housework is to keep Daddy happy. The cartoony art style with the signature plunging shadows of the early ages of animation lends itself well to a childlike sense of fear. The world is exaggerated and absurd in the way that children often perceive it, juxtaposed against the stark black gloom in all the corners of the house. This creates a suitably creepy atmosphere combined with monstrous booming footsteps threatening your father’s closeness to ramp up the sense of anxiety.

As well as the stains on every surface and the spiders waiting to leap out at you from the shadows, a handful of little details in Bad Cheese build context very well. There is a schoolbag rotting in the corner of your bedroom, which triggers you to reflect on how Daddy was too busy to ever take you to school.

More details like this could have amped up the tension enormously. As it is, the pacing in the gameplay is sometimes misaligned with the anxiety the story is evidently trying to generate. In the early sections, the character worries about being in trouble when Daddy gets home “soon”, but no amount of faffing around not completing your chores results in any consequences. This results in an abrupt tonal pivot in later chapters when Daddy is at home and starts counting down from ten (in a way that is terrifyingly familiar and threatening punishment) in speed challenges that are made more difficult by the less than ideal controls.

Bad Cheese has an ambitious story at its foundation, and there are certainly elements of the game that convey it well. It’s clear in every frame that a lot of work has gone into crafting the aesthetic. The atmosphere and the relationship between the two successfully injects a sense of terror into the simple search-and-interact gameplay of household chores.

However, there are also times when it feels like the style has overwhelmed the substance of the game, and the nuance of such a delicate situation has been lost. There is great scope here to explore a dark story, but it feels like Bad Cheese requires a bit more polish to land that tight balance quite as well as it wants to.