Bonus : You do not need the Switch 2 Welcome Tour

The “Switch 2 Welcome Tour” is well-intentioned— a tour through your new Switch 2 as a museum exhibit, similar to Astro’s Playhouse on the PS5— but in practice it’s an incredible bore that will make you regret your $10 lost. If you’re thinking you need it to complete your new hardware purchase, don’t worry. You really don’t.

Players walk into a museum shaped like a giant Switch 2 and must traverse its length from the Joy-Cons to the screen to its cavernous innards. In the process they are shown many of the technical features of the system, and have them explained. Unlike Astro’s Playhouse, a game firmly concentrated on having some fun with console advertising on the side, Welcome Tour is more of an “edutainment” game. Education is walking far in front of entertainment here, advertisement's hanging out in the background, and grinding boredom is the main attraction.

Nintendo has put together quite a few demonstrations and mini-games here to show you the unique features of the system. Unfortunately, rather than getting right to the treat, they’ve built this museum around the mini-games to space them out and force the session into an hours-long “quest”. Each “stage” is a part of the console, which you need to thoroughly explore— finding and flagging each individual component, including a couple of invisible parts— to get to the next part. I don't think this is necessarily a bad idea– I bought Welcome Tour, after all– but it didn't come out well in practice.

And that's as far as I can let you go without a subscription, because, as you are aware, the Switch 2 cost a lot of money. I bought this to review it for you! Definitely not to run Mario Kart races deep into the night, no. I didn't buy this for my happy space, I bought it for my readers and quite frankly the fact that I suffered through Welcome Tour should prove that. Please subscribe to the newsletter to see the rest of this piece and many other bonus pieces I've written just for my supporters. Thanks.