When I booted up Nintendo Switch Welcome Tour on my shiny new Nintendo Switch 2, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Was it a game? A tutorial? A tour of the console’s inner workings wrapped in cute Nintendo polish? Turns out, it’s a bit of all three. A mash-up of mini-games, tech demos, and console feature spotlights meant to ease players into everything the Switch 2 has to offer. Think Wii Sports meets Astro’s Playroom, but with a price tag that makes you question why it wasn’t just bundled in for free.
Right out of the gate, Welcome Tour does what Nintendo does best: slick presentation, joyful animations, and a user interface that’s clean and playful. The game’s world is segmented into themed zones—each one dedicated to highlighting a specific feature of the Switch 2, whether it’s the new haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, infrared sensors, or the upgraded Joy-Con gyros. Within these zones, you tackle short, fast-paced mini-games and tech demos that act as both tutorials and challenges.
The gameplay loop is straightforward: explore an area, talk to NPCs, take on mini-games or challenges related to a specific feature, and earn medals based on your performance. Collect enough medals, and you unlock harder difficulty tiers, new regions, or hidden extras. There’s some light exploration, dialogue with cheerful characters, and even a bunch of collectibles scattered around the map. It’s engaging at first, especially as you start learning the console’s hidden tricks, but the pacing can get bogged down when you’re stuck doing the more mundane tasks just to progress.
The real heart of the experience, though, is in the tech demos. These aren’t just gimmicky one-offs—they’re surprisingly polished, imaginative slices of gameplay. One mini-game had me shaking the JoyCon like a maraca and getting to feel the advanced rumble feature. Another let me utilise the Switch 2’s mouse mode to play golf and solve puzzles. These sections show off the Switch 2’s full potential, and honestly, I’m more excited about what other developers might do with these features than I am about playing through Welcome Tour a second time.
There’s no doubt Nintendo pulled out the stops with the visuals and sound design. Every area of the game has that polished Nintendo magic—colorful, welcoming, and detailed in all the right places. You can tell it’s a love letter to the hardware, and it does feel like the team had fun putting it together. But beneath that polish is a game that sometimes doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. Is it an interactive manual? A full game? A playground? It never fully commits to any of those.
This brings me to the elephant in the room: Welcome Tour costs money. That stings, especially when you consider that Astro’s Playroom came free with the PlayStation 5 and did a stellar job of both showcasing the DualSense controller and providing an entertaining, nostalgia-packed platformer. By contrast, Welcome Tour feels like something that should have been pre-installed on every Switch 2 console out of the box.
The price issue gets worse when you realize that full completion of the game is locked behind accessories. Want those final gold medals? You’ll need the USB camera, a Pro Controller, and a few other optional pieces of hardware. That’s a major bummer. Games that gate content behind real-world purchases often leave a bad taste in my mouth, and here, it undermines the entire concept of a “welcome tour.” If you want players to explore your system, this would have been a really creative way to do it and likely would have been praised as Nintendo thinking outside the box and providing an ‘interactive manual’. But alas, it seems a different decision was made along the way.
Progression is tied to collecting medals through completing objectives and mini-game challenges. That system works fine—until the tasks start to drag. Some missions ask you to find obscure collectibles or talk to a certain number of NPCs before unlocking the next demo. After a while, it feels like padding. The real momentum-killers, though, are the quizzes. They start off novel, teaching you trivia about the system’s architecture and history, but quickly devolve into dull, school-like tests. The questions are mostly multiple choice and often insultingly obvious, but slogging through them is mandatory if you want to go for 100% completion. Unless you’re a completionist, you’re not missing much by skipping most of them.
The best parts of Welcome Tour are the moments that don’t feel like tutorials. When the game just lets you play, it shines. There’s enough here to make you curious about how other games will utilize the new features. In that way, it succeeds as a proof of concept. I can totally see a third-party rhythm game nailing the upgraded haptics, or a first-person puzzle title making smart use of the motion sensors. If anything, Welcome Tour made me more excited about the Switch 2’s future than about finishing the game itself.
But not everything works. The game drags when it leans too hard into exploration or trivia, and it never quite delivers that full Nintendo charm that you’d expect from a first-party title. Compared to something like Mario Kart World or the upcoming Donkey Kong, this feels like a curiosity, not a must-play.
Final Thoughts
Nintendo Switch Welcome Tour is an interesting, well-polished introduction to the Switch 2’s capabilities. It’s got charm, it’s got cool ideas, and some of the tech demos genuinely impressed me. But the experience is uneven. Between the padding, locked content, and awkward quizzes, the fun often gets buried under a pile of system-showcase obligations. And that price tag? Still hard to justify.
If you’re a diehard Nintendo fan or you love tinkering with new hardware, there’s definitely some value here. But for everyone else, I’d say wait for a discount—or skip it entirely and use that money to grab a great indie game instead.
A Nintendo Switch 2 review code was provided by Nintendo for the purpose of this review.
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6.5
- + Does have a high quality presentation
- + Showcases the new features of the Switch 2 well
- + Great for people that love to know how things work under the hood
- - Hard to justify it not being free with the console
- - Pacing issues with tasks that are just busywork
- - Can’t see everything on offer unless you purchase additional peripherals
