Altogether now! “This should have been a pack-in.”
Or, if that simply wasn’t on the table, free for the first year. Or free with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. It’s painfully obvious to everybody but Nintendo that paywalling this specific software further behind the already-pricey console is a mistake.
And it’s a real shame that more people won’t experience it, because it makes you feel good about your sizeable investment in the hardware. Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is a peaceful, in-depth exploration of the system, taking you around and inside the device, its controllers, and peripherals (some sold separately – more on that later), and highlighting its various features and novelties. This is the platform holder celebrating and deep-diving into its tech in a way that feels both unusual but also very Nintendo.
In some ways, the granular tech focus here is a necessity. Switch 2, by its nature, is an iteration on a theme, so if you’re going to charge a hefty sum for something superficially ‘the same but bigger’, what better way than to highlight every single upgrade in a fun, demo-filled game of hide-and-seek that breaks it all down?
And the devs really do break it all down. You’ll be running around capacitors, over circuit boards, batteries, and myriad chips and components that appear to be modelled extremely faithfully. This is Nintendo tearing down its hardware virtually so you don’t have to, and being remarkably frank in some regards. There are various examples of ‘we did our best’ while discussing the challenges faced with, for instance, dispersing heat and optimising battery longevity. There’s no console-wars chest-beating here; it’s all very self-effacing. It’s essentially an Iwata Asks/Ask the Developer interview in game form.
The game itself takes the form of an explorative, isometric walking-sim affair. You control a person jogging (or running if you hold down ‘B’) around an oversized Switch 2 and accessories propped up and exhibited across an enormous park. Or are you tiny and the Switch normal-sized? It’s never made clear, but hot Welcome Tour lore aside, you run around the virtual gear while the real-life gear throws novel audio-visual and haptic feedback at you. It’s a particularly great showcase for HD rumble 2 – I only hope that devs take the time to implement it properly in other games.
Stamp Rally plinths pop up when you approach components and gate progress between areas. So, to get to the main console, you have to locate 18 stamps on the left Joy-Con, and so on. Simple enough, though some less obvious ones do present a challenge, usually when the button or port is on the inaccessible underside and you’re hunting for the plinth.
Then there are the minigames, with multiple variations of the same game grouped on little exhibits across the hardware. It’s all very ‘Switch 2 Experience’ for anybody who attended those pre-launch events. There are over 50 games and beating them earns medals to unlock harder variants.
Some, naturally, are better than others. The Mouse Mode ones are generally more challenging and/or frustrating. Removing stains with a paint scraper was much harder on my leg or the arm of the sofa than on a table (where I donned the Joy-Con straps and got the medals first try); my lap or a cushion worked fine with other games, though. If you do hit a wall with one, just move on. You’re able to instantly warp to anything you’ve visited by hitting ‘X’ to bring up the menu and selecting it, a real godsend.
Elsewhere, you’ll be hunting floating pixels, shooting balloons, colouring within the lines, guessing the angle of the kickstand – all sorts. Only one minigame — Breaststroke: Floaty Frustration — is outright bad (it lives up to its name), and while there’s nothing here you’re likely to fire up again once you’ve completed the game, they’re all effective at demonstrating the possibilities of your shiny new console.
On that theme, and beyond the realm of proper ‘games’, 14 tech demos highlight neat functions and features, letting you test the noise reduction qualities of the built-in microphone, make the Joy-Con emit sound effects, and plenty more. The 3D Sound demo with the helicopter is a particular highlight, but they’re all fun to mess around with. My kids absolutely loved sawing logs, shaking maracas, and hearing themselves with robot voices. The HDR demo didn’t wow me, but these are cool toys to play with. Who wouldn’t want to rev a motorbike with a Joy-Con?
Beyond that, dozens of info desks contain multiple-choice quizzes testing your knowledge of nearby Insight boards. It’s here where Nintendo goes into detail about the hows and whys of design, and in all honesty, it’s incredibly interesting for anybody with a penchant for gaming hardware.
The light-hearted quiz questions aren’t taxing if you’re paying any attention whatsoever to the slides, though it’s fun to imagine a world where ‘Love’ or ‘Glue’ hold the Joy-Con on. They do get progressively more challenging as you journey inside the console, but there’s typically one comedy answer, two vague possibilities, and the obvious correct one. Get a question wrong and the relevant Insight board is flagged, so you can quickly swot up and repeat.
Burning through Insights for review isn’t the best way to digest them, and they got repetitive towards the end. One named ‘Games Use Electricity’ isn’t as blindingly obvious as it sounds, but the title made me guffaw. You’re not obliged to do any of the quiz stuff, either, and along the way there’s lost property to find, some charming NPC writing, cute moments as you skate across the screen, and a bunch of nostalgic nods to Nintendo history.
There are also some smirk-worthy ‘purely for reference’ disclaimers when they show animations of the Joy-Con being wrenched from the console and other non-sanctioned actions, but Welcome Tour feels like Nintendo being refreshingly open and surprisingly confident. I can’t imagine any other platform holder going into this sort of forensic detail for fear of a red-ring-level embarrassment down the line. It might even help allay fears about another Joy-Con drift debacle this gen, as the new mechanisms feature very prominently here.
There’s an assuredness in inviting this kind of scrutiny; an admirable pride in the work. “I can’t believe they’re showing us as much as they are,” says one of the milling NPCs, and I can only agree. It’s a quality product.
And a surprisingly lengthy one. Due to the weird 10-day delay before playtime data is shown on your profile, I can’t say exactly how many hours I’ve spent opening everything and getting nearly all the medals, but it’s got to be seven or eight (and at least one of those was spent on the nightmare dual-mouse UFO bullet hell/star collection minigame). There are 12 ‘areas’ in all, going from the top of the left Joy-Con into the system itself via the dock, the Joy-Con grip and straps, and even peripherals that don’t come with the system – specifically the Camera, the Pro Controller, and the Joy-Con wheels.
If you don’t own those things? You can still earn ‘fast-track medals’ from them via a cute little SOS trick, so progress isn’t gated behind them. However, access to a handful of minigames and demos are effectively blocked if you don’t have the requisite gear (the Camera, a pad which has the ‘GL’/’GR’ buttons, and a 4K TV).
For me, it’s nothing to get too upset about — there’s so much else to be getting on with, and what’s the alternative? Remove those experiences entirely? — but it’s another straw on the camel’s back if you’re already irritated by the cost. It also highlights another unavoidable aspect of Welcome Tour: as well as being part instruction manual, part demo, it’s also an ad for those lovely accessories you didn’t pick up. Yet.
There’s an undeniable allure to seeing pristine hardware at this resolution, too, without the skin cells and dust particles and pet hairs and assorted household detritus that attaches itself the moment you remove the packaging. Welcome Tour is deliciously, fetishistically sterile, with gorgeous specular highlights on the logos as you run across them, close-ups of glistening ports and shiny sticks. It tickles the same zones as Sony’s Astro Bot in some ways, though this is much more of a museum piece.
It does a fantastic job of highlighting the design chops and consideration that goes into every aspect of Nintendo’s products, from the 0.05mm height adjustments to individual face buttons to the minuscule tab on a single foot of the dock that means it will slide (rather than topple over) if you accidentally yank it with a cable connected.
Ultimately, Welcome Tour is modestly priced ($9.99 / £7.99), too, despite the wider economic context surrounding Switch 2’s launch and the general upset over pricing across the industry which makes charging for it feel like the last straw. For your buck, there’s a surprising amount of bang, though.
So, one more time, then: This 100% should have been a pack-in. But the software itself? It’s great.
