The Switch port of Rime is in a much better place now

Today’s update makes it look and run better

As promised, Grey Box has revisited the less-than-stellar Nintendo Switch version of Rime.

Today’s update offers significant improvements for last year’s puzzle-adventure title, from crisper visuals and better textures to a larger draw distance and a more stable frame rate.

Here’s a helpful side-by-side comparison from Direct-Feed Games:

Patch 1.0.2

• Increased visual fidelity, bloom and post-processing
• Sharpened image resolution
• Opening Cinematics visually improved
• Fixed possible stage exploits that would enable players to skip parts of the stages
• Increased texture quality in specific areas
• Increased view distance
• Fixed an issue with foliage density, shadows, and render distances
• Updated texture mipmaps for the Fox
• Improved global mipmaps
• Improved shadow distance and quality
• Fixed instances of foliage pops
• Stabilized FPS
• Optimized the Boys cape and hair physics
• Rebuilt streaming volumes
• Fixed an issue that allowed you to see outside of the map in later stages
• Updated lighting to prevent bleed through
• Updated the quality of trees in earlier stages where they would display poorly

The company expressed concern about the patch potentially being too large to make it through Nintendo’s approval process, but clearly they worked something out. The before-and-after is startling.