I normally hate talking about video games in terms of how much money they’re worth, but with Welcome Tour – and against the backdrop of video games’ wider squeeze on its audience – that discussion feels unavoidable. To get it out of the way: Welcome Tour feels like a pack-in game, and after the news broke that it would, instead, cost you actual money to play this seemingly staid, interactive console manual – one that seemed pretty similar to the free, pack-in Astro’s Playroom on PS5 – there was a very understandable reaction. That being: this game is probably not going to do very well.
Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour previewDeveloper: NintendoPublisher: NintendoPlatform: Played on Nintendo Switch 2Availability: Out 5th June on Nintendo Switch 2
Thankfully, predicting Welcome Tour’s success is not my job. Instead I get to tell you this: Welcome Tour is, actually, genuinely quite good fun. Beneath that rather buttoned-up surface there’s humour and charm, some signature Nintendo, however you define that, but also something curiously sincere. Perhaps the best way to describe it is in just saying what it is. Welcome Tour is a game where the Switch 2 console is set up like a museum, full of scattered interactive exhibits and varying takes on edutainment. But in a way that’s the clever bit: it does actually feel like playing Nintendo’s take on an actual, pretty decent museum. It’s not spectacular or thrilling, but I’m also not sure I’ve actually played anything like it.
Here’s the basic setup, and it is relatively basic. You’re a little visitor walking around a slightly pulled-apart Switch 2 console as if it were one, vast building. The console’s split up into sections, such as the left Joy-Con, the screen, the right Joy-Con and so on, and to be allowed to move from one to the next you need to find all the little hidden pop-up explainers dotted around the previous location. Accessing minigames and demonstrations, meanwhile, requires you to earn enough stars, which are themselves earned from, you guessed it, completing previous minigames. There’s also a lost property where you can deposit the occasional forgotten item you might find dotted round the museum. And, well, that’s more or less it, at least from what I was able to play.
I feel I’m probably not selling this! Here’s the good bit: the minigames are kind of brilliant. While few of the ones I tried were particularly characterful – this is no nose-picking WarioWare fare – the lack of visual flair was at least partially made up for by how strangely compelling it was to learn a bit about how a games console works by playing them. This is ultimately a game that’s going to be played by Nintendo’s hardcore, the people who passed the startlingly high bar that was set for pre-ordering the Switch 2 via Nintendo invitation, for instance – and also just the people keen enough to actually nab a now seemingly sold-out console on launch day altogether, with only Mario Kart World as a fully new, full-price, first-party launch game. In that way this all kind of makes sense: the people with Switch 2s at launch are probably exactly the kind of people who find learning about HD rumble kind of fascinating. (Or they’re kids, who will probably find a collection of minigames good fun regardless.)