Title: Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour
System: Nintendo Switch 2 (eShop)
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 06/05/2025

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Story

In a strange world, giant Nintendo Switch 2 pieces fell from the sky and have conquered an entire town square. Strange people decided to make a big kiosk out of the whole thing and you must go on a super giga epic quest to find all the stamps and investigate the dark mysteries of this new device…

OK, I lied there. The game has no plot whatsoever besides the aforementioned kiosk motif to tour the features of the system. There’s an awful lot of dialogue though, and how the game frames it kinda irritates me. See, Welcome Tour’s writing does nail the feeling of being at a kiosk demo event, but it nails it too much for my liking, with the enthusiasm given for sillier parts of the system such as the Camera or HD Rumble 2 causing my eyes to roll.

By the end of the experience I was finding the dialogue absolutely insufferable, and the only time I actually got any sort of humor were the quizzes, which have the silliest incorrect answers that made me laugh during a few of them. Still, the overall nature of the dialogue made me feel like I was playing a glorified ad, which is pretty strange considering it’s a set of experiences meant to teach you about the very device you have in your hands, so why would you want to buy more stuff for it?

Presentation

Being tour themed, the Welcome Tour takes place on an Nintendo Switch 2, with a lot of various things on and around the device components to give off a museum-esque vibe. All the characters, including the one you pick from in line are portrayed in a weird, faceless style that reminds me of that Good Job game from a few years ago, only with the humans actually having color and normal proportions to them now. Still, the game looks fine for the most part, and being how this whole experience is meant to show off the system, it does so pretty decently when it calls upon a complicated feature like VRR or 120FPS.

In fact, Welcome Tour does a lot of cool presentational tricks, showing off and teaching fun facts about various aspects of the system such as the speaker having a 3D effect, or the mic having strong noise canceling capabilities, or how the Joycon 2 were redesigned to be more comfortable digging into your hands for longer play sessions. Considering how Tech Demos generally focus on wowing with gimmicks and the like, this is not surprising, and Welcome Tour has plenty of amusing ones, with my personal favorite being a laughably silly Super Mario Bros 1-1 demo where it takes place in a microscopic window on a 4K TV to demonstrate the resolution of such devices.

The sound design in general is also pretty decent. Exploring the main components of the system has BGM sounding pretty much like elevator/mall music, and a bunch of the minigames/demos have their own goofy songs to go along with them. None of these are worthy of being played outside of the game, mind you, but they fit and remind me mostly of the goofy Nintendo I remember from the 3DS minigames. Nice stuff overall.

Gameplay

Welcome Tour is a game I could pin as one with many goals, being that the focus of the experience is to showcase a bunch of things your Switch 2 can do now that you own it. Most of these games rely on the Joy-Con 2, but a couple of these do rely on or require extra accessories. However, they aren’t required for 100% medal completion, since you can just use a morse code to beat the minigames you aren’t able to do by getting Skip Medals, so that saves me from buying the silly Switch 2 camera.

There is a general progression route to Welcome Tour, and it relies on a Stamp Rally. Each component of the Switch 2 system has several stamps scattered around it, and finding each one will unlock the gate to the next area. Rinse and repeat for nearly half the alphabet, and you’ll complete the tour of the system components. You don’t have to play a single minigame, do a single quiz, or mess with a single tech demo to “beat” Welcome Tour, and honestly I had the most fun going around each part of the system and discovering new bits and pieces for the stamp rally, and it gave me a good couple hours of entertainment from that alone, while checking out the experiences I felt comfortable doing along the way.

In that sense, going through the Tour at your own pace and only doing the experiences you want to partake in leads to Welcome Tour being a pleasant time. You could knock out a few hours, learn some fun facts about the system, and end the stamp rally pretty satisfied afterward. Unfortunately, Welcome Tour still has a lot of minigames and tech demos to mess around with, and I found these to be a lot less fun than the stamp hunting.

For the Tech Demos, they show off a variety of things in the Switch 2 Joy-Con, mostly to do with Rumble or the Mouse mode. These are fine, and do show that yes, the Joy-Con 2 can make pretty impressive rumble that cause sounds to play out of the controller, but goofing around for a while I found them to be pretty forgettable, and more or less affirmed my stance that HD Rumble on Switch 1 was a pointless, underutilized gimmick, so thus it’ll probably be the same on Switch 2. The demos that were more engaging to me ended up being the ones that had you playing around with VRR/4K displays in some way, since those features I expect to be used out of the console a lot more going forward, and the examples shown in Welcome Tour are pretty darn cool, and being able to mess around with framerate and VRR at will in one example was rather fun.

When it comes to the actual Mini-Games present here, they’re all over the place. Some are pretty darn tricky such as one relying on the Pro Controller 2 and having you use the GL/GR buttons to try and unlock a button combination as quick as you possibly can, while another one had you trying to hold down ten spots on the touch screen without lifting one from its spot, which quickly made me realize how terrible I am at playing Twister. Then there are the absolutely stupid ones such as a 4K pixel hunt, which pretty much requires you lean against your TV to find tiny white dots in order to identify them in time. Impressive at showing 4K, but rather annoying to actually play.

Then there are the many, many games requiring a mouse in some form. Welcome Tour really, really wants you to know the Joy-Con 2 has a Mouse feature, and hardly anything in this entire experience made me convinced a mouse is even a worthwhile gaming feature. There’s a decent putting minigame, but playing that made me feel like I was in the dark era of using Wii Motion Controls for getting annoyed at struggling with precise swings vs the much easier solution of using a darn button and a timing system. Then there’s a minigame where you have to put shapes into holes, and this requires you rotate the mouse, showing an actual benefit to using Mouse Mode VS the touch screen, since you can’t exactly rotate via a touch screen all that well.

On the other hand, you have way too many short, gimmicky mouse minigames that are barely engaging past getting the gold medals if you wish to 100% Welcome Tour, which I why I much prefer the approach of just playing what interests you as you go on the stamp rally rather than trying to 100% everything all at once. Trust me, you’ll have a lot more fun this way rather than growing curious as to who at Nintendo really, really wanted a mouse feature, and you’ll be able to enjoy the actually good minigames while you’re at it. I think my favorite of the mouse games ended up being the one where you have to guess where something is hidden based on how hard the mouse vibrates when hovering over a spot on the screen, but even that wasn’t enough to make me convinced these Joy-Con needed yet another lame gimmick.

Lastly, you have quizzes, and lots of them. Each part of the system has an area where you can ask a rep to bring out some fact sheets regarding certain aspects of the console, and upon reading all of them, you can partake in a quiz that goes over exactly what you just read. The wrong answers given here, as I noted earlier, are pretty amusing, but the quizzes in general are incredibly dull and I do not recommend you even bother taking the quizzes, but rather just read the factsheets given. Or if you feel the need to 100% the quizzes anyhow, wait a few weeks for those thoughts to exit your head before taking them so they’re a bit more of a challenge. The fact sheets are by far where most of the fun facts come from, only for the quizzing part to not be all that special. Still, it did add to the feeling of Welcome Tour feeling like a museum of sorts.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour isn’t a disaster or a disgrace to humanity like some out there frame this as. Nor do I think Welcome Tour being paid would be a bad idea as long as the experiences were fun and engaging. After all, Wii Sports has hardly any content, yet was a full retail product in Japan and sold really well, because the games within were fun to replay with various friends and family.

On the other hand, the stuff in Welcome Tour is hardly memorable at all. Some of the challenges being legitimately tough was nice to see, especially with those secret medals, but a lot of them felt meaningless or just outright stupid, using gimmicks that I assure you will rarely be used in that manner to begin with. The only gimmick I felt Welcome Tour showed off pretty well was the Mouse Mode, but even then the tour was a little bit too reliant on it for most of the minigames, and none of the minigames are ones you’re gonna bring your friends over to play or beat your best time in. Maybe some of the experiences or tech demos will wow them for 2 minutes before you move onto a better game, and maybe the mouse mode will entertain you for a couple minutes, but I seriously think this thing’s obsession with a poor gimmick hurts it. Yeah, it showed me all the mouse mode is capable of, but it didn’t exactly make me think the mouse mode was good.

What feels the most perplexing to me about the Welcome Tour is how the stamp collecting is pretty fun for the short time it lasts, yet everything else here just doesn’t do much to impress. Learning about the system is neat and if you’re a super duper tech guy who enjoys knowing all the ins and outs about your device, you’ll get a good 3-4ish hours outta the Welcome Tour, but who knows how much this software will be useful a year or two from now? Maybe a new accessory or feature comes out, and this software will be quickly out of date.

So while the Welcome Tour is a strange grab bag of various features for the device, it feels more like an experience doomed to be a relic rather than a memorable launch experience that truly brings in the wow factor, and when the extra meat here feels like a waste of time, it really begs the question why you’d want to pick this up for $10. I don’t think it should have been free per say, but Welcome Tour would have been more enjoyable overall if it just had better minigames and tech demos, and maybe didn’t try to shoehorn the mouse into a lot of the experiences. Seriously, I’ll be shocked if something outside of a Pokemon Ranger comes out and proves to me that there’s nothing the Mouse can do that’s not just as enjoyable with a real controller.

I give Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour a 5 out of 10.