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.
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.)
And reader, it is fascinating. Do you know how the rumble effect is actually generated in the Switch 2’s Joy-Con? I do! Nintendo just made me sit a quiz on it. It uses a linear resonant actuator, which means it only resonates on a single axis and, gosh, I mustn’t spoil the fun of finding out for yourself. I am only half-joking here, because if you have even a latent interest in this sort of thing there is some genuine joy in the process. First you read a few – say three to six – very short explanations on something, like the aforementioned HD rumble. Then you take a little quiz for a gold star – get you! – and then you might play a little minigame to illustrate the point. For rumble, the one I tried involved sliding the Joy-Con across the tabletop, in mouse mode, waiting for the rumble effect to be at its strongest, and clicking when you feel you’ve found its peak. It’s surprisingly challenging – that presumably being the point, to emphasise just how HD this HD rumble is – and took me a few goes before I got one almost dead on.
Others are close to being just straight-up games. Another involving using the Joy-Con as a mouse gave me a genuine appreciation of how nimble it could be: use the mouse to control a little ship dodging spiked balls on an increasingly cluttered screen, aiming for a high score. Another involved using the Joy-Con to simulate putting with a golf club, only rather than trying to use as few strokes as possible, in this version of minigolf you had to get the ball into the hole as fast as possible (frankly it was miserable – not all of the minigames are hits). Another had me going full Tom Morgan, in guessing the frame rate of different sports balls flying across the screen (and full “nobody needs anything more than 60fps” conspiracy theorist, too, but let’s not open that can of worms).
Across the screen – where your little visitor might slip and skid if you run too fast for too long, like they’re darting across an ice rink – there’s also a wonderful visit into the opposite Joy-Con, its golden guts fully on display. The presentation, again, is still a little dryer than you’d hope, but then again maybe that’s the point.
From my slightly extended but still brief time with it, it feels like Nintendo has created, if not the most wildly entertaining, at least the most spiritually accurate take on visiting an actual museum dedicated to a games console. You read a bit, you play around a bit, you go, “huh,” and have a little ruminate on what you’ve learned, and move on. If it weren’t for all the Joy-Con waggling I’d ideally play this thing with my arms clasped behind my back, head slightly cocked to one side, assuming the official position of the museum attendee. Welcome Tour might be a little short on overt personality, and missing the brightness and the vivacity of most Nintendo games, but it is undoubtedly novel, and undoubtedly something that’s been thought about at great length. In a way, that’s about as Nintendo as it gets. But I’m not going to tell you how much that’s worth.
