Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour - Welcome To Paid User Guides (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour
Released: June 5th, 2025
Developer: Nintendo's Worst
Publisher: Nintendo's Temerity
Systems: Switch 2
I thought leading the charge on standardizing an $80 base price for so-called “AAA” videogames was a new low for Nintendo. You can imagine my surprise when, on the launch day of the Switch 2, the company proved it can stoop even lower.
With Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, they’ve sunk beneath the earth’s fuckin’ crust. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t used some saved up Nintendo Points to witness the gall of this premium demo for myself.
They’re charging ten bucks for a glorified user manual. More specifically, they’re selling the kind of introductory tech demo that normally comes with a new console as standard. Just to make things more insulting, it's worse than any such tech demo. In fact, it’s incredibly shit.
As I describe Nintendo’s pathetic excuse of a paid user guide, I need you to remember something important - Astro’s Playroom comes preloaded on every PS5 and it’s such a charming, impressively put together showcase that it spun off into a full videogame by popular demand.
Nobody in their right mind would want to see anything spinning off Nintendo’s premium grift. I wouldn’t mind seeing it spin through the air after being hurled into a goddamn bin, but other than that, it should rot forever.
The one truly impressive thing about Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is how bad it makes the Nintendo Switch 2 actually look. Its sheer ineptitude is amazingly counterproductive.
Dismal audiovisual presentation, a complete lack of character, creatively bankrupt minigames that are dated even by the standards of Flash browser games. The wanton lack of effort put into this scam couldn’t do a worse job of hyping up the console if it tried - not that it ever entertains the notion of trying.
Or, y’know, ever entertains.
Welcome Tour presents itself as a barren museum installed atop a giant Switch 2. The first thing you do is pick an avatar from a premade line of faceless generic people, because even though we’ve had personalized Nintendo avatars for years, incorporating Miis was apparently too good of an idea.
The indistinct cyphers we get instead of any Nintendo characters are so aggressively generic they might as well be AI generated. Bereft of any charm whatsoever, Welcome Tour feels like something explicitly designed to be as joyless an experience as possible.
Joylessness is a running theme. Everything is sterile and threadbare, backed by incessant looping elevator music and barely any other sounds. That’s before we get to the interactive elements, which are so poor as to be frigging embarrassing.
You’re stuck on one of the Joy-Con controllers until you run to each of its components and press a button. This is how you progress through your tour, and it’s exactly as enthralling as it sounds. It’s at least less miserable than what makes up the vast majority of content - little info boards followed by banal quizzes.
Yeah, it’s bloody unbelievable, really. Patronizing quizzes of three or four questions about the boring stuff you just read, that's what most of this is. They’re charging ten dollars for it.
Access to much of the tour is locked until you earn medals by completing that which Nintendo does allow you to play. Whatever modicum of amusement you might scrape out of Welcome Tour has been arbitrarily controlled and rationed, as if to hammer home how dismal a time it’s meant to be.
The minigames manage to be even worse, so much so it’s hard not to think of them as self-sabotage. I’m not exaggerating when I compare them to ancient web games - the Switch 2’s mouse controls are shown via one that’s literally found on Google as filler. You drag a crummy little spaceship around to avoid Clipart GIFs of spiky balls, and you're meant to be wowed by it.
One “game” tasks you with moving the controller back and forth until you feel it rumble, and that is it. No, that’s seriously the entire game.
Every single demo is ugly and amateurish work, with zero consideration for how awful such rudimentary non-efforts are making the Switch 2 look. Again, I remind you, Astro’s Playroom was free. This is a purchase, and it looks like children made it. Really stupid children.
By the way, if you’re ever designing a premium demo for a new console, consider not putting in a “game” where you make users guess between 120fps and a lower framerate without showing the relevant images beside each other - when it goes up against 60fps, there will be people who get it wrong, and they'll think your higher framerate isn't all that good.
Welcome Tour's framerate demo reveals one laughably inherent risk with the whole product. Not every user is going to get these challenges right, at which point one of two undesirable things will happen - they’ll feel frustrated by their inability to appreciate their new console or, more likely, they’ll conclude the console isn’t as remarkable as it's claimed to be.
This is why it’s important for a tech demo to avoid being a lowly piece of trash that simply boasts about how great everything is. Presenting individual features in boring isolation isn’t going to make any single component of the console look or feel exciting.
Games like Wii Sports and Astro’s Playroom didn’t merely exhibit components, they made those components fun, which is what customers are actually interested in. They didn’t quietly walk the audience through tech specs and arrogantly expect applause - they contextualized the features, made them engaging, and spared them being overly scrutinized.
The fireworks demo where you toggle HDR on and off uses such poor color and lighting choices that the effect is almost imperceptible. Its big finale firework looks identical between HDR and SDR. It’s not just me - I’ve seen people come away disappointed in HDR as a concept thanks to Welcome Tour’s presentation.
What moronic software.
It’s hard not to think of the whole wretched stunt as malicious. To charge for an interactive user manual is disgusting enough on its own, but to be as contemptuously half-arsed about it as Nintendo’s been is truly appalling. This is the first time I’ve been genuinely shocked by the game industry’s audacity in over a decade.
Also, until they walked it back with a patch, you couldn’t collect all the medals if you hadn’t bought all the extra peripherals and had a 4K TV. To think, a tech demo that requires… uh, I guess we’d call it non-downloadable content? It’s a spectacular level of contempt.
Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour might be the laziest piece of shit a publisher’s ever put out. I don’t give a fuck that using the L word is considered poor form. This appalling paid-for tutorial is inexcusably lazy on top of being just plain inexcusable to begin with.
The only thing Welcome Tour has welcomed us to a brand new breed of garbageware.
1/10
