Feature: Nintendo Life eShop Selects (July 2026)

Our picks for the best eShop games on Switch 1 & 2 in July

Welcome, one and all! As we segue into August and the busy end-of-year release calendar peeks its head over the horizon, it’s time for the July edition of our eShop Selects awards.

This month, we had five games that met our 7/10 criteria for our monthly showdown: Switch eShop games that don’t have physical releases (including Game-Key Cards) at the time of release. As always, our writers and contributors have voted for the top three eShop games we reviewed that met the criteria in July 2026. We then tally the votes and dish out medals for the winners.

Unfortunately, code for the eShop-only Jurassic World Evolution 2 arrived too late for inclusion – you’ll have to wait a while for our review to see if that would have made the grade!

Honourable Mentions

Before we get to the top three, let’s look at the contenders who didn’t quite make the podium. Shoutouts also to the explicitly “Not Bad” 6/10s Gecko Gods and D-topia:

Moss: The Forgotten Relic (NS1/2) | Review: 7/10
Turnip Mountain (NS1) | Review: 7/10

Now, onto our three winners…

Nabbing the bronze medal is Prideful Sloth’s Go-Go Town, which came out on both Switch 1 and 2.

While the premise — which has you overseeing the development of an island paradise as mayor — sounds extremely Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the city-building aspect here is strong and Michelle enjoyed its blend of frantic and cosy.

“As the town morphs from fledgling fields to monstrous metropolis, its needs grow, and with it, your serotonin and stress levels,” she said in her review. “All this felt very familiar in parts: I had a lot of deja vu of the real-time building from SimCity and the Two Point series, and the heart-pumping of Overcooked, as well as echoes of Animal Crossing and Pokopia’s collect-build loop.”

Sounds like a great mix, and it went down well with the rest of the team, too.

Sitting at second place with the silver medal, we’ve got The Mermaid Mask, the fourth in the Detective Grimoire series and a follow-up to 2019’s Tangle Tower.

Another Switch 1 and 2 release, developer SFB (Snipperclips, Crow Country) adds Mouse Mode on Switch 2, making the pointing-and-clicking even pointier and clickier. More importantly, it’s another engagingly excellent game in the small studio’s impressive catalogue.

“The Mermaid Mask finds a brilliantly entertaining niche between deduction game and point-and-click,” said Roland. “The tangled mystery of the death of Captain Mortuga is full of compelling twists and every suspect adds a surprise along the way. Some tacked-on logic puzzles slightly break the dramatic flow, but not enough to undo the magic of a well-constructed puzzle box of a game.”

Those on the team who’ve played it evidently loved it, and it’s onto the Wishlist for the rest of us!

This week’s winner by a wide margin, Denshattack‘s on-rails train-grinding and infectious, blue-sky energy got the team excited when it dropped in the middle of the month.

Ollie called developer Undercoders’ efforts “an effective homage to Sega’s Dreamcast era without feeling too derivative” in his review, with only the narrative dragging down the thrill of the grind a bit – and fortunately you can skip the talky bits if they don’t hit with you.

We choo-choo-choose you, Denshattack!

< Nintendo eShop Selects – June 2026

Do you agree with our ranking? Tell us about your favourite eShop releases of last month by voting in our poll and sharing your thoughts in the comments.

What’s your favourite July 2026 eShop game from our picks?

Denshattack! (Switch 2)
Go-Go Town! – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition (Switch 2)
Moss: The Forgotten Relic (Switch 2)
The Mermaid Mask (Switch 2)
Turnip Mountain (Switch eShop)

How we decide our eShop Selects top three: As we reach the end of every month, the Nintendo Life staff vote on their favourite titles from a list of games selected by the editorial team. To qualify for this list, these games must have been released as a digital-only Nintendo Switch eShop title in that particular month, and must have been reviewed on Nintendo Life; we select the qualifying games based on their review scores.

Staff are then asked to vote for three games that they think deserve to sit right at the very top of that list; first choice gets three points, second choice gets two points, and third choice gets one point. These votes are then tallied to create a top-three list, with the overall winner taking that month’s top prize.

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