Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour review — A self-indulgent museum

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is the game everyone says should be a pack-in title for the Switch 2, however after playing it I can see why it isn’t. It’s a short game targeted squarely at tech enthusiasts, a demographic Nintendo rarely goes after. It dives headfirst into the console’s specs and features, reveling in HDR, refresh rates, and mouse mode. As someone who loves tech and seeing how games are made, it’s a very interesting experience, but it ends up feeling far too self congratulatory and runs out of steam pretty quickly.

Welcome Tour has you exploring an exhibit all about the Nintendo Switch 2 from an isometric perspective. It’s got a cute, toy-like visual style with your character and other attendees all running around on the console and its peripherals. The game is segmented into areas covering one thing at a time, such as the Left Joy-Con 2 or the inside of the console itself. Each area has a selection of minigames, quizzes, technical demonstrations, and stamps to play, complete, and collect. The only thing you really need to open up the next area are the stamps: collect all of them in area A to move on to area B and so on. What makes this difficult is the fact that stamps are hidden until you move within a very small circle around them, so you have to intuit what parts of the device are noteworthy, like the ABXY buttons or a headphone jack. 

Just going after the stamps will get you to the end, but it’s the least interesting part of the game. Instead, you’ll want to linger in each area to experience the quizzes and minigames on offer. As a tech head, the quizzes and tech demos were what interested me the most. You get to read about some specifics on how the technology of the Switch 2 works, and these sections do a pretty good job of explaining fairly complex topics like upscaling, memory vs. RAM, and more. I’ve tried explaining frame rates to my family, for example, and they just don’t understand, but I think seeing this minigame in action would do a much better job of showcasing what it is. 

As you progress through the game, however, the game starts to repeat itself and aggrandize Nintendo as a company. For as short as Welcome Tour is, it still feels a bit too long for its own good. It feels like it devolves into the developers saying “Wow, this thing we made is cool! You should purchase this accessory! Maybe two!” rather than telling you anything useful or interesting about the technology or how it was made.

The minigames and tech demos also follow this trend, with most of them utilizing mouse mode in some way to demonstrate something another minigame or tech demo has already demonstrated. I can only think HD Rumble 2 is cool so many times before I get sick of it by moving my cursor over a shape or some paint. There are still one or two cool demonstrations near the end, but a lot of them feel far too similar. I would have enjoyed a bit more about the console’s accessibility features, how they work and who they help, for example.

Many also won’t be able to experience all of them, as some require a 4K TV or accessories like the Pro Controller 2. There is a code you can input to skip these experiences and get the medals from them, but it is a bit frustrating. It’s especially annoying when NPCs are talking about how great these accessories are and how they want to purchase them. Again, Welcome Tour dips into being an advertisement way too often despite being $10.