The Stretchers (Switch)

The Stretchers is a game whose release was truly strange. Appearing suddenly on the Switch’s eShop with no prior marketing, the game was developed by Tarsier Studios who is best known for their Little Nightmares horror game and published by Nintendo who normally seems averse to horror titles and don’t often work with indie developers. Perhaps the strangest part of this pairing wasn’t that it happened, but the game that we got out of it was a bright and colorful co-op paramedic game in the vein of games like Beavers Be Dammed and Overcooked.

 

Taking place on a set of connected islands, The Stretchers is about what seems like a very nice English town suddenly having multiple cases of a strange new malady called the Dizzies that starts spreading rapidly through the populace. A mustachioed villain called Captain Brains is terrorizing the town with his special hypnotic hat that inflicts this illness, but a pair of paramedics head off to undo the wave of dizziness he aims to spread across this otherwise pleasant burg. The silliness in the premise carries into the town and its people as well, the game full of small absurdities and having plenty of fun little touches like the people of the town having an unusual obsession with sumo wrestling that means many of the patients you’ll be rescuing are up-and-coming wrestlers themselves. A man named Professor Doctor offers to upgrade the ambulance across the adventure to prove you can get places faster than an e-mail, a man named Hayden Seeks camps out in hiding places around the town waiting to be found, and characters are frequently found flopping around like ragdolls after the city’s unusually high pig population rams into them or the people end up falling on one of the abundant trampolines. Its quirkiness keeps things lighthearted and fun despite the player characters being medical professionals, but as soon as they establish all the ailing citizens are just dizzy, it’s pretty clear the game is going for an outlandish take on the profession instead of something potentially serious.

The Stretchers structures itself as a set of missions you advance through, each one having a set location where you need to get every dizzy individual into the back of your ambulance. The paramedics can drag people around fairly easily, only really needing to work together to carry fatter citizens like the sumos, but if you do want to get higher points and potentially make things easier for your two person team, piling people up on a stretcher is both vital to getting bonuses for storing all patients in the ambulance at once and has benefits for carting people around. If a dizzy patient is placed properly on the stretcher, they’ll sort of magnetize to it, still able to fall off if enough force jimmies them off but the character will be pretty firmly affixed to it so long as nothing messes with them. Piling people on top of each other is outright encouraged and the magnetism is still mostly in play while doing it, but there can be a few little problems while doing so.

 

Some characters are what my co-op partner and I called “wigglers”, people who, when placed onto the stretcher, will continue moving, dislodging themselves and potentially others by doing so. This seems to trigger more often if you’re rushing to pile people on too quickly, and while missions do have a timer to provide bonus points, most can be completed within the span even if you aren’t loading people on quickly. Even if you can’t complete the mission in time for some reason though, the only penalty is less points earned during the end of level score totaling. Wigglers can eventually magnetize if they are placed carefully or end up laying the right way, but there can be some unfortunate glitches where they pass right through the stretcher entirely, sometimes launching everyone else off of it in the process. While there are little graphical glitches elsewhere, the citizens who occasionally pass through the stretcher or refuse to go on it are the only ones that really damages the gameplay at all, and it’s a problem that can usually be avoided through proper caution instead of trying to slap as many bodies on the pile as quickly as possible.

 

While putting the potential glitches front and center may make The Stretchers sound like a sloppily designed game, besides these rare moments with the wigglers, the missions are designed to be fun little puzzles to complete with a friend. Levels will feature all sorts of complications that you need to avoid or use to your advantage to safely get the suffering citizens to your ambulance. The sawmill has tools active you’ll need to safely move around and a bank vault’s security systems can send you sprawling, but the package sorting center’s conveyor belts can get you to new areas and serve as shortcuts while some areas have long chutes you can drop people into to skip a long trip down. Construction sites, the beach, a castle, and more keep bringing fresh gimmicks to the gameplay, the task of safely navigating the area to grab patients tested in many fun new ways. While some like the moles who send you flying and the cannons you can get shot by seem like they should be deadly, The Stretchers only punishes the player for falling for the traps by docking their score and of course slowing down whatever work they were doing.

Because of the puzzle-like nature of the missions, players will often have to cooperate to get all the patients out of the situations their dizziness has lead them to. At a construction site you have to move equipment around to give the other player paths to people, certain active hazards need to be wrangled by one player so the other can slip by, and many tools end up coming into play that require both people holding onto the item to operate it. At many points in the game there’s little trouble caused by splitting off from the other player, this allowing for a good degree of multitasking and allowing for the single player mode to be a much easier transition despite the fact that you get to control both of the customizable paramedic characters if you run it alone. However, many missions, both paramedic ones and ones where you’re simply helping people out around town with odd jobs, involve the use of objects like a saw that must be pulled back and forth properly, dynamite that’s too heavy to carry alone, and the somewhat awkward mower that will cut through tall grass and open new paths. The mix of freedom to work alone and the need for cooperation gives players both the agency to explore things that interest them but requires the sometimes chaotic collaboration that makes playing the game’s two-player mode so exciting.

 

Between missions as well as at the end of missions, players are able to freely drive around the island town they’re working in. Only one player can drive the vehicle at the time, the other mostly a passenger until a few upgrades later in the game let them contribute to the navigation somewhat, but these driving segments can have plenty of wild moments as well that can be enjoyed even by the spectating player. Stunt jumps are littered about, presents are hidden in special places around the islands, and the game eventually gives you a sticker book full of optional objectives that either tie to regular mission play or reward the player for going off the beaten path during the driving segments to explore the town and its secrets. The ambulance’s penchant for flipping over is easily dealt with as well, players able to pursue their adventurous spirit and desire for violence-free carnage as they smash through bus stops and mailboxes between their people saving missions. If one player hogs the driving seat it can lose its luster, but the spirit of cooperation that guides you during the missions should hopefully transfer over to reasonable arrangements for messing around so that the freedom to pursue curiosity is maintained even outside of structured challenges.

THE VERDICT: Wonderfully silly in style and concept, The Stretchers is an enjoyable co-op romp that is enhanced both by the need to cooperate and the freedom to break away from each other to explore things that pique your individual interest. While it has some bothersome glitches, the paramedic work is routinely challenged with fun new puzzles and the world provides many ways to mess around with small rewards for taking the time to explore. Some moments like ambulance driving are skewed towards one player’s enjoyment, but there’s plenty of content to participate in equally with a partner and the new ideas keep providing fresh material to interact with until you’ve cured your final Dizzy.

 

And so, I give The Stretchers for Nintendo Switch…

A GOOD verdict. While it has its unusual unpolished moments like the wiggling patients, The Stretchers is an excellent addition to the growing genre of complicated co-op where players need to work together on a task that would have probably been easier if only one set of hands was necessary. The Stretchers doesn’t strain its need for cooperation though, the freedom to grab a few patients on your own usually giving players time to learn the new mission’s design or set things up before they start engaging with the necessary collaborative activities. The family-friendly silliness on show is delightful and the sticker book gives players reasons to do more than just go from mission to mission, the ambulance driving especially fit for searching out fun diversions to engage with. Items like the saws and dynamite are definitely good fits for the required co-op segments, but perhaps a few more involved moments of collaboration could have helped some missions be even more interesting or prone to memorable and funny interactions.

 

While its existence and method of release were a surprise, The Stretchers came together very well. While not technically sound in some ways, the vision for the game comes through both in the humor on show and the gameplay concepts it pursues. The simple idea of saving dizzy people from disaster and stacking them high on your stretcher is toyed with in many fun ways, and while it could use some patching up, it certainly provides a healthy amount of entertainment because of its smart melding of freedom and structure.