In my opinion, the most interesting thing about Nintendo’s Switch 2 at the moment is its intentional pivot toward remake nostalgia. And you know what? I’m not even mad about it. Though, to be honest, I have an admittedly conflicted relationship with the past, and I’d like to think I’m not alone.

On one hand, nostalgia is a magical portal to the childlike wonder we mandatorily leave behind in order to mature into adults. If we want to get real Jungian about it—and I’m no Carl Jung scholar, only an enthusiastic layman—we could say that our main mission in the second half of life is to rediscover the child we abandoned through the rigors of what the influential Swiss psychologist might have called apprenticeship. As we learn and grow, innocence essentially gets traded for knowledge, experience and expertise. You eat the forbidden fruit and your eyes open. You’re more capable now, but you’re more jaded, too.

If we seek wholeness, however, it’s in our best interests to go back and reintegrate this lost child, ideally while retaining the wisdom and experience of adulthood. We must get reacquainted with our puer aeternus , our eternal child, which is that vital, playful part of us that earnestly looks to the stars and emanates reverence for the overwhelming vastness of the cosmos. It’s the wide-eyed kid that gleefully observes insects and sunrises and, in this case, video games, with pure, unrelenting awe. He or she is the open and curious being we inhabited long before cynicism crept in, and disappointment.

This is all to say, I’ve been playing a ton of Star Fox lately, a polished relic from the years before Y2K, and the nostalgia it provides draws a straight line between my current grown self and my own reemerging (and reintegrating, hopefully) puer aeternus . Let me tell you, it injects quite the hit of throwback dopamine. But we must be careful when indulging in such time travel. I’ll explain, hopefully.

But first, to catch people up: This recent Switch 2 remake, released in June 2026, is actually a reimagining of Star Fox 64 , which in turn is a reboot of the original Star Fox on the Super Nintendo. A full-on remake Inception , as it were, and the déjà vu sense of reheated leftovers isn’t lost on me. Seriously, how many times can we play the same Star Fox game? But…the punched-up leftovers taste really good, admittedly, and I am having a good time, even if that time feels somewhat haunted.

Haunted by what, exactly? Well, the darker side of nostalgia, I suppose. While playing old games can be a healthy way of reconnecting with what Jung might call the divine and spiritually-renewing child, it can also be (arguably) psychologically stunting, especially if the activity isn’t consciously approached. Instead of using nostalgia as rich compost for further development across the lifespan, it can easily act as a quagmire that prevents an individual from ever truly growing up. I say this humbly, because I’ve often used it as such an emotional crutch. With regret, I’ll add.

Externally, I see this shade of stuntedness in the retro gaming community all the time; sometimes a room full of old video games comes across less as celebration of classic joy and more as a deep unwillingness to move on, or to meaningfully change and expand one’s psyche, I’d argue. The line between current enrichment, which helps us become something new, and wallowing in moments we can never actually get back, is scarily thin. Are we appreciating the history of a vast medium or grasping at ghosts?

Of course, Nintendo isn’t the only company who doles out this variety of nostalgia catnip. We’ve seen similar remakes of Silent Hill , Resident Evil , Ratchet & Clank , Dead Space , The Last of Us , Until Dawn, Gears of War , and Croc: Legend of the Gobbos , among countless others. Nostalgia is good business, because it taps into our never-ending need for certainty and comfort. Our memories are safe; they’re mind movies we can watch over and over. They’ve already happened. The future hasn’t.

As I recently played through the familiar missions in Star Fox , I often found myself asking: Is this fun solely because it’s a timeless and quality game, or is it fun because I’m using it as a surrogate for meaning in the present, to relive ever-fading parts of my childhood? Am I less experiencing Star Fox as it is, and am I more watching the comforting mind movie it conjures? Maybe these questions, like most philosophical ponderings, are ultimately unanswerable, but I think they’re worth considering.

That said, from a journalistic perspective, I do think this remake is very good, even if Star Fox is showing its age. The controls are tight, the enhanced visuals are strikingly polished and the newly added cutscenes help to flesh out the notably barebones story. Unlike PlayStation’s Wolverine , Star Fox knows it’s an arcade game at heart, and there’s a lot of satisfaction to be found in replaying the game’s campaign over and over to explore different branching paths, as well as achieve better ratings and unlock digital trinkets. I’m always up for a solid rail-shooter; Rez , Panzer Dragoon , Child of Eden are also favorites of mine.

I never owned an N64 back in the day, but I had friends who did, so I’ve played through my share of these old Lylat missions. They just didn’t look this pretty in 1997, naturally, and the dialogue wasn’t modernized (hearing Slippy go full Gen Z and tell Fox ‘we’re cooked’ was a 2026 moment, for sure). So yes, Star Fox is undoubtedly a heavy-hitter remake, despite its notable core design datedness, but the bigger one obviously hits this November: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time .

You can definitely feel the anticipatory buzz for Ocarina of Time all over social media. To get Jungian yet again, and please forgive and indulge me, but you can tell Nintendo’s 1998 Hyrulean adventure still permeates gamers’ collective unconscious. As with Star Fox , my nostalgia draws me to yet another old thing made new, and yet again I’m left wondering if the comforting oldness is why I even bother to care in the first place.

I suppose if we approach these kinds of remakes with the intention of making our present lives more whole, by warmly revisiting the past solely as a curious tourist and not as a permanent citizen, then it’s all good. Or maybe, just maybe, this writer should stop overthinking things and just look forward to playing Ocarina of Time on his Switch 2 in November.

It’s not that deep, bro. Or is it?

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.” ― Carl Jung