Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is a game intended to serve as an introduction to the Switch 2’s many new features, acting like a museum to show off the Joy-Con 2s’ mouse mode and HDR rumble, the screen’s 120Hz resolution, the system’s 4K TV output, and other upgrades over the first Switch. It’s also $10, which is why it’s completely doomed at launch. That’s not simply because it’s a $10 tour of a system’s features. It’s because five years ago, Sony showed how to properly deliver a console-introduction game—for free.
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A $10 Ticket for the Welcome Tour
Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is a glorified demo with a $10 price tag. It’s very much a museum for the Nintendo Switch 2, letting you walk through the system as a tourist in a three-quarters, overhead perspective. You start on the left Joy-Con 2, move on to the console itself, and then the right Joy-Con 2. After that, you explore the internals of the Joy-Con, dock, and accessories, with each piece serving as its own separate zone.
Each zone has hidden stamp kiosks for each button, connector, and most other physical components, and you must find all of them before moving on to the next zone. There are also information desks where you can learn more about the Switch 2’s features, and rooms and minigames that demo those features. Overall, Welcome Tour is a fun little idea. It’s just that it was even cuter and more fun when Sony did it with Astro’s Playroom.
Astro’s Playroom is an example of how to successfully tour a new game console (Credit: Sony)
Astro’s Playroom: How to Show Off Your New Console
When the PlayStation 5 hit store shelves in 2020, it came with Astro’s Playroom preinstalled. It was an incredibly charming dive into the PS5’s new features, presented as a 3D platformer in the vein of Crash Bandicoot or Super Mario 3D World. It was short, but filled with love for PlayStation’s history. It also featured many collectibles and secrets to unearth as you explored environments that evoked the different aspects of the PS5’s hardware.
It was so good that four years later, it saw a $60 spin-off, Astro Bot, that was universally seen as an excellent game worth its retail price tag. If Sony had asked for $10 instead of giving Astro’s Playroom away, it probably wouldn’t have a cute, new mascot and game series.
Welcome Tour is a fun little idea. It’s just that it was even cuter and more fun when Sony did it with Astro’s Playroom.
Astro’s Playroom felt like you were playing inside a PS5 theme park. Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour? Not so much. It’s often a curated promotional attraction, guided by red-shirted staffers with lanyards. That isn’t me being facetious. Virtual tour guides literally crew the exhibits in Welcome Tour, and every zone appears to have a personality-less object, like a hat or a notebook, that you find to take to the lost-and-found.
Seriously, that’s what it looks like. (Credit: Nintendo)
Some Tiny Bits of Fun
This doesn’t mean Welcome Tour is without any fun aspects. The big standout is a 4K resolution demo, where you can play through Super Mario Bros. World 1-1 on a single screen. It’s a genuinely cool depiction of modern game resolution. Besides that, most Welcome Tour demos and minigames are pretty basic offerings, like using the Joy-Con 2’s mouse controls to guide a cursor through a maze or identifying a ball’s frame rate as it moves across the screen.
It really is neat seeing all of World 1-1 on a single screen (Credit: Nintendo)
All Welcome Tour activities are the kinds of exhibits you’d find at a science museum. You read a few placards on the wall, look at a few dioramas, and maybe press a button or turn a crank to make a machine move and show you how it functions in the process. It’s actually pretty impressive just how much the game nails that exact feeling, and that has its own kind of charm. But that charm only goes so far when the museum in question is a very single-minded showcase of the Switch 2 that costs extra money.
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Ignoring History Lessons
Nintendo has such a long and influential legacy in video games that limiting Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour to only the Switch 2, even with the cool Super Mario Bros. demonstration, makes it a huge waste of potential. Keep in mind the company opened an actual museum in Kyoto just last year that goes over its century-and-a-half-long history. There are tiny nods besides SMB World 1-1. For example, there’s a casual mention that Nintendo has used rumble since the Nintendo 64 when explaining how the Joy-Con 2’s HD Rumble 2 works.
It’s truly baffling to see Nintendo being so unambitious and nonchalant about really diving into its history. It’s not new, though: Last year’s Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, a compilation game aimed specifically at fans of early Nintendo games and speedrunning enthusiasts, showed a similar lack of ambition with a paltry game list and almost no extra content like box art, development sketches, or music libraries in it. It could have been a love letter to a singular era of Nintendo’s past and everything it represented, but it was a series of little challenges from 14 NES games. Welcome Tour feels a lot like that.
The camera demo had me making this face. (Credit: Nintendo)
There’s one more problem with Welcome Tour, and whether it’s a nonissue or an unforgivable transgression is a matter of perspective. To try all of the game’s activities, you need the Switch 2 Camera and Switch 2 Pro Controller. Those are $55 and $85 accessories, respectively, and not included with the system.
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On one hand, Welcome Tour is a showcase of the Switch 2’s new features, so showing off the accessories makes sense. On the other hand, it means you must spend an extra $140 if you want to complete everything. Considering how inconsequential the entire experience feels, it strikes me as a pretty minor ding when held against the game costing any money at all.
Unboxing the Nintendo Switch 2Good Demo, Bad Game
I’m certain I would be more forgiving of Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour if it were free. As a welcome-to-your-new-Switch-2 tour, it’s pretty lengthy and has some interesting demos. As a $10 game, though, it doesn’t hold a candle to Astro’s Playroom. And that one was free.
There’s a real value to shipping a game console with a free pack-in game, whether it’s a full experience or just a simple set of demos. It’s wild that Sony appears to understand that better than Nintendo. Considering the company saw such massive success by including Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt with the NES, Super Mario World with the Super NES, Tetris with the Game Boy, and Wii Sports with the Wii, Nintendo should understand that any asking price for Welcome Tour is too much.
None of this should sour you on the Switch 2 itself, though. Welcome Tour is just a demo that falls flat. For more on the console as a whole, keep an eye here for my full review of the system, coming soon. And if you’re wondering about what makes the Switch 2 different from the first Switch, my head-to-head comparison walks you through the details.
About Will Greenwald
Lead Analyst, Consumer Electronics
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