Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour Review

Words don’t tend to mean much these days. We don’t have museums anymore, we have ‘immersive experiences’. It’s not art, it’s ‘content’. There are no audiences, only ‘demographics’. Tweets aren’t even tweets anymore, they’re ‘posts on X - The Everything App’. And, in a similar vein,Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Touris not a video game. It’s not an immersive experience, it has no content, and it’s made for no demographic I can think of.It’s barely anything.

It’s not just that it’s bad. You can kind of forgive a game being bad when it’s trying to do something. It’s whyBalan Wonderworldhas legions, or at least dozens, of fans willing to go to bat for it. Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour isn’t trying to do anything. It just is. It doesn’t break, which I suppose is evidence of a little bit ofNintendoquality control, but it’s an entirely joyless experience seemingly by design. It’s like someone has gamified a HR presentation on a new in-house word processor. I get that I need to know the basics of this, but do we all have to pretend we’re having fun while we’re at it?

Switch 2 Welcome Tour characters waving over an orange background.

Nothing Welcome Tour Teaches You Is Engaging Or Interesting

Did you know the Switch 2 has cooling vents on the left…andthe right?! Here’s a better question - do you care even a little bit? Because that’s all Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour has to offer you. Your little avatar, who looks like it was birthed in the corporate hellscape of a metaverse Mark Zuckerberg would be forced to act excited about in order to sell a new VR lampshade, wanders around aSwitch 2. They interact with things like ‘the A Button’ or ‘the Cable Clip’, and if you don’t interact with all of them, you don’t get to move on.

Are they easy to find, you ask? Sorta. The obvious ones, like the aforementioned A Button, are pretty noticeable. But it often asks you to go to specific ridges of the devices where seemingly nothing is so it can point out information you’d already have to know to be playing the thing in the first place, like the Switch 2 dock having a removable back panel to keep HDMI leads secure. It doesn’t give you any information about these things, not that you’d want it. It just congratulates you on having found it and lets you continue your slow march towards the grave, wasting time discovering that the right Joy-Con has a magnet just like the left Joy-Con.

There are parts of the game generously described as ‘Quizzes’ which might more accurately be described as ‘reading those pamphlets no one ever reads’. These do explain some of the tech, like how magnets and mufflers are combined for the perfect rumble experience, and sometimes you’re asked questions about it. Sometimes you’re not. It never really matters.

Welcome Tour’s Games Aren’t Really Games

To be fair, there aresomegames included. To be realistic, these aren’t actually games at all. Though occasionally it reminds you the Switch 2 is a games console and not, say, an air fryer with an extremely long information booklet and a shooting gallery, most of the time you feel as if you’re helping program an interactive whiteboard you don’t entirely understand.

There are games like moving a mouse around a maze, moving a mouse away from falling spikes, moving a mouse to the spot with the most rumble, moving a mouse to guess a shape, moving a mouse to find tiny pixels, and moving a mouse to rapidly click on targets. You may have noticed a pattern there - all those ideas suck. Also they all use a mouse.

I understand that the mouse is the flashy new tech, and enjoyedmy demo of Drag x Driveat the console reveal, as well asseeing the mouse/keyboard light when playing Metroid with mouse aim. But aside from the games here being very bland, this does not feel like an advert for the Switch 2. Most of the games will still be mainly stick and motion play, and little is done to emphasise this part of the console in Welcome Tour. It’s very specifically a ‘game’ (or an immersive experience that fails to immerse you) for players migrating from the Switch, not for new Switch 2 players. For a game that already seems like it’s for nobody, this dates it even further. I don’t want to hear Dolly Parton’s new stuff, play Jolene and Two Doors Down.

Not to mention heavy use of the mouse means constantly moving position on your sofa, and that’s before you account for switching from docked to handheld to tabletop between games.

Nintendo Is Afraid To Be Itself With Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour

Other attempts to gamify things fall flat, too. Pursuing medals feels fruitless when the activities they unlock are more inane, more complex versions of the drudgery you’ve just put yourself through already, and the ‘lost and found’ saga of collecting missing items ruins what little intrigue it might have created by limiting you to one item at a time, forcing you to frequently return to the help desk, or more likely, ignore these items completely.

In fact, the presence of other fake people losing their fake things is just annoying, because they want to talk at you (with all the conversational skills of thatPokemonkid who likes shorts) when you’re busy clicking around desperately to find the last interactable on the Joy-Con Comfort Grip so you can move on with your life.

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is a valiant concept, and that’s the best thing you’re able to say about it. But unlike the charm ofWii Playor1-2-Switch, it feels like Nintendo is keen to not be embarrassed this time around, and out of fear of not wanting to be laughed at, has offered up nothing at all.

It’s mildly amusing to rattle Joy-Con like maracas, but a Nintendo table setter should strive to be better than ‘mildly amusing’. And that’s the strangest part here - Nintendo has not failed with Welcome Tour. It has succeeded in its ambitions. But if the Switch 2 is to match its predecessor, those ambitions had better grow, and quickly.