Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour review: the perfect pack-in that could have been

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It was a day I’d been anticipating for months. The Nintendo Switch 2 was finally in my hands, and a new world of possibilities was at my fingertips. And as luck would have it, I had to catch a cross-country flight not 24 hours after unboxing my console. I was thrilled; for six hours, no stress or adult responsibilities would get between me and my shiny new toy. I boarded and got ready to spend what I assumed would be a flight full of kart driving and Pokémon catching.

Instead, I played Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour for nearly five hours straight.

If you’ve been following Nintendo news ever since the Switch 2’s reveal, that may sound a little sacrilegious. The console’s other launch game, an interactive tech demo built to show off the new hardware, was branded a black sheep right from the jump. It looked like a virtual instruction manual that should have been free but would cost $10 on top of an already pricey console purchase. As mockery took hold, Nintendo tried to plead that the package was more valuable than it seemed. After hyper fixating on it during valuable Mario Kart World time, I both scoff at that and completely get it in the same breath.

Despite being one of Nintendo’s most head-scratching launch games ever, Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is a deceptively effective piece of edutainment. It’s a genuinely informative celebration of game console engineering that’s loaded with simple, but engrossing proof of concept minigames that paint a promising picture of what’s to come. It’s a cut above 1-2 Switch as far as tech demos go, but the price tag only feels more absurd in context of what’s often a cleverly disguised shopping catalogue.

A slice of edutainment

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is essentially a museum exhibit in game form. Players are dropped into an exhibition celebrating the grand launch of their new system and given free roam to explore every piece of it. The Joy-cons, the display, the dock, even accessories like Nintendo’s new camera — everything is turned into an explorable space. The aim is to learn about how each piece of the system works through a stamp rally, pop quizzes, minigames, and interactive tech exhibits. It’s the most Nintendofied version of an instruction manual you can imagine, and that idea is both more entertaining and useful than it sounds.

How did I find myself laser focused on it for an entire flight? That’s largely thanks to a gradual progression system that gradually deals knowledge out in tasty hooks. Stamp collecting is the core thrust of that, as I need to find a terminal attached to every key part of a system component to unlock the next area, with 12 in total. It has the satisfaction of a simple checklist, but one that shows players exactly where every key part of the console is.

While I’m searching for stamps, I’m also checking in at scattered kiosks to take bite-sized quizzes. There, I simply need to read a few short blurbs about a specific Switch 2 feature and answer some basic reading comprehension questions. If that sounds like homework, well, okay, it is. The later portion of Welcome Tour, where it gets into the nerdy internals of the system, especially feels like a chore to get through. But those chores aren’t without merit. Each quiz is genuinely informative, getting into nitty gritty details about the system that aren’t explained anywhere else. It’s the only place you’ll learn that the new Joy-cons can simulate sounds, or that the new touchscreen supports 10 simultaneous touchpoints. Even more fascinating is when Nintendo uses quizzes to break down the engineering that went into Switch 2, explaining what crucial function even the smallest piece of plastic has. If you’re someone who really cares about how things are made, Welcome Tour is a handy reference document to have.

If you still think all of this sounds tremendously boring, the more interactive side of the package will be more of a draw. In order to illustrate how certain features work, Welcome Tour is loaded with minigames built around mouse controls, HD rumble, the touch screen, and even the Pro Controller’s back buttons. Every game is simple in nature, landing somewhere between a Game Builder Garage experiment and a full Mario Party minigame, but many are shockingly fun. Something as simple as guiding a spaceship around falling spike balls becomes an obsessive high score chase just because of how well it showcases the mouse controls’ precision. Time flew away during my flight as I shot balloons in first-person, hunted for tiny glowing pixels on my display, and played an ingenious game of hand Twister that required me to get all 10 of my fingers firmly placed on colored squares. Don’t be surprised if some of these games get repurposed for the next WarioWare installment. My primary gripe here is that it feels like a missed opportunity to not work in some leaderboards so I can fight my friends for high scores.

All of that is tied off with a few interactive tech demos that make techy concepts easier to understand. A VRR slider tool lets players play around with frame rates and see the difference between numbers in clear terms. There’s a HDR fireworks display that lets players shoot off rockets and see how the brightness changes when the feature is enabled. Another tool lets players create their own HD rumble vibrations so they can feel the difference between frequencies on the fly. I walked away from each one knowing a little bit more about the tech thanks to hands-on experience.

See, Welcome Tour is the kind of thing you have to meet where it is: It’s Nintendo turning something technical into playful edutainment. It’s cut from the same cloth as Nintendo Labo and Game Builder Garage, created to inform and inspire kids. It makes engineering look like a fun puzzle where every challenge a game console presents can be solved with a well-placed piece of metal. The Nintendo Switch 2 is filled with design decisions like that, as explained in quizzes about how its magnetic Joy-cons and redesigned kickstand work. Learning can be fun, and Nintendo makes a strong case for itself as that zany substitute teacher your kids adore.

Paying for an ad

That’s the brighter side of Welcome Tour, but the sour grapes around it are legitimate. $10 doesn’t sound like a lot of money, especially for a game that takes around six hours to complete before any long-tailed high-score chasing, but that price tag becomes very hard to swallow the deeper the game goes. On a fundamental level, it feels like fans have to pony up for an instruction manual that either should have come with their $450 box or just uploaded to a Nintendo website for free. Why is so much valuable information about how a console’s chip works locked behind an admission fee? Any amount of money feels absurd for that.

I try to brush that off initially as I find myself obsessing over the minigames, but the sense of unease only grows once I start exploring the console’s optional accessories. A chunk of the game has me learning about the Pro Controller, steering wheel attachment, camera, and other items that don’t come in the box with the system. Welcome Tour hypes up all of those products, going into full sales mode as it explains how several webcams should theoretically work with Switch 2, but Nintendo’s camera is your safest bet. At one point I talk to an NPC while exploring the steering wheel, who says that she wants to ask her dad to buy her two for Christmas. The charming illusion of Welcome Tour faded away at that moment; I realized that I was playing an advertisement.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Every tech demo game is an ad to some extent. They are built to hype up a new console, compelling buyers to get new games so they can see all the features they learned about in action. Look how well that worked for Astro’s Playroom, which turned a four-hour PS5 ad into a Game of the Year-winning platformer built to hype up the PlayStation brand. But something about Welcome Tour feels especially egregious. For instance, there are a small handful of minigames that you simply can’t play if you don’t have a controller with back buttons or a camera. Buying the console and then buying Welcome Tour still isn’t enough to even access the full thing.

All of that leaves me torn as I try to decide if it’s worth recommending it to new Switch 2 owners. On a moral level, it feels a little slimy. $10 isn’t a lot of money for the hours of play you get here, but it feels like paying to watch a commercial. Nintendo even uses the platform to pepper in some revisionist history, proclaiming that it’s always been a pioneer of features like voice chat on console — one of the most patently absurd things I have heard in a year where the Pittsburgh Steelers signed a washed-up Aaron Rodgers after two historically embarrassing seasons with the New York Jets.

But then there’s the other side of me that can’t deny how much I got out of this launch day oddity. I’m more knowledgeable about gaming tech, I have a greater appreciation of technical engineering, and I’m filled with genuine curiosity when I look at my Joy-cons. I could keep chipping away at my mini game high scores for hours, daring friends to one up me in a GameChat call. Nintendo believes that it’s fair to put a price on that experience and I find it hard to entirely disagree. The fact that this dragged me away from an $80 tentpole launch game has to count for something. Maybe Nintendo can play peacemaker by giving those who convince their friends to buy it a commission if it leads to a Pro Controller sale. $10 for an affiliate link seems like a fair trade, no?

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour was tested on Nintendo Switch 2.