Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is a baffling, fascinating toy that still makes no sense to me

(Image credit: Nintendo)

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is… well, odd. As one of the lucky few that actually had the opportunity to already put my hands on the Nintendo Switch 2 – though not my tongue on games, sadly – a constant internal refrain has been revisiting my time with Mario Kart World, playing Donkey Kong Bananza, and more. I'm still wrestling with what to think of the double mouse controls on 3-on-3 basketball game Drag x Drive, but I'm more certain of my opinion on the aptly named Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour: utter bafflement.

If you somehow missed the reveal, Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is a minigame-filled, Nintendo Switch 2-branded video game in the same way that, for example, Astro's Playroom is themed around the PS5. There are all sorts of tech demos, fun facts, and interactions buried inside in a way that comes off as a digital handbook of sorts. If you want to explore the inner workings of the Nintendo Switch 2 within a digital IKEA built out of the bones of the console, well, that's where Welcome Tour comes in.

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Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour – Gameplay Video – Nintendo Treehouse: Live | Nintendo Switch 2 - YouTube

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Unlike Astro's Playroom, however, Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is not a pack-in game, meaning it doesn't come with the purchase of the Nintendo Switch 2. Instead, Welcome Tour is an additional $9.99 digital purchase on top of what is currently another $450 for the console itself. I'm certainly not alone in being baffled that Nintendo has chosen not to include it with the purchase of a Switch 2, but I'm perhaps in slightly rarer company in that I've actually played the thing and have come away with roughly the same opinion.

"It's a pretty robust piece of software," Bill Trinen, Nintendo of America's VP of Product and Player Experience, told IGN as part of a larger interview at the recent hands-on event when asked about Welcome Tour being sold separately. "There's a lot of great detail in there."

"For some people, I think there are people who are particularly interested in the tech and the specs of the system and things like that, for them I think it's going to be a great product," he continued. "It's really for people that want more information about the system rather than necessarily a quick intro to everything it does. And for that reason and just the amount of care and work that the team put into it, I think it was decided that, 'Yeah, this feels like $9.99 is not an exorbitant price. It feels like a good value for what you're getting out of the product.'"

Trinen is right! There is a lot of great detail in Welcome Tour, and more than once I found myself repeating little minigames in order to get a higher score, because the higher score meant more medals meant more minigames unlocked. You know the drill. And I genuinely learned quite a bit about, for example, how the magnets work in the Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Cons, the wildly granular capabilities of its rumble functionality, and the game card slot from the various quizzes spread around the digital recreation of the left Joy-Con 2 and Nintendo Switch 2 screen.

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Nintendo Switch 2: Welcome Tour screenshot — (Image credit: Nintendo)

But compared to all of the other games that have been shown for the Nintendo Switch 2 so far, these features rise to the level of neat and nifty but at no point does it come close to being necessary. I find myself thinking back to the Wii U's Nintendo Land, a game best described as "fine" that originally sold for $60 when not included as a pack-in game as part of the Wii U Deluxe Set. In some ways, the low price of $10 makes Welcome Tour feel somehow cheap, making it even less desirable.

Admittedly, the version of Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour I played is not the one everyone else is going to get at launch. The right Joy-Con 2 was blocked as the demo was limited to just certain areas, and none of what appeared to be little fetch quests where you gather items and return them to people seemed to be functional. Also, the entire experience was limited to roughly 20 minutes, which meant that I kept trying to speedrun my way into new areas – arguably not the best possible way to experience a video game of any caliber.

It's not that Welcome Tour is a bad game, even. It's an unusual experience and a strange decision from Nintendo, a company known for doing unusual and strange things that often have a way of paying off. But I'm struggling to see the vision here. $10 feels like it's designed to be a, "Sure, why not," purchase, but that's also low enough that it feels like the sort of game Nintendo might have just let folks have considering they're paying more than ever for a sequel to the Switch. In fact, if I'm being honest, it feels downright unwelcome.

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Price of progress

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