Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is like a bad Astro’s Playroom you have to pay for

The Nintendo Switch 2 is almost here. In the recent Nintendo Direct, we got our first real look at Nintendo’s latest console and some of the games that will be available. On the whole, the new console looks great, although it’s more expensive than most people were expecting.

During the Nintendo Direct, we also learned about one of the games that will be available at launch. It’s called Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, and it looks about as fun as the name suggests. It feels like a missed opportunity for Nintendo, especially as one of its rivals has shown just how good games can be at demonstrating the features of new hardware.

What is Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour?

A guided tour of the Switch 2 hardware

Nintendo

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is a game designed to showcase some of the new features of the Switch 2. In the Nintendo Direct for the new console, Tetsuya Sasaki, the Hardware Design Lead for the Nintendo Switch 2, stated that the game was intended to “help players better understand the Switch 2 hardware.”

The idea makes sense. A lot of the changes to the Switch 2 aren’t immediately obvious just by looking at the device. When attached, the Joy-Cons look just like the Joy-Cons from the original Switch, but the new Joy-Cons connect magnetically rather than through the awkward sliding locking mechanism of the current model.

By presenting the hardware changes with a game, Nintendo gets to show off all the hardware updates in the Switch 2. The game can also introduce players to some of the new capabilities of the Switch 2, such as the way that you can use a Joy-Con as if it were a mouse.

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The Astro’s Playroom vibes are strong

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour looks a lot like the PS5 title

Sony

My immediate impression upon seeing the brief clips of the game that were featured in the Nintendo Direct was that it was a lot like Astro’s Playroom. If you’ve not played it, Astro’s Playroom is a short-but-sweet 3D platformer that comes pre-installed on the PS5 and is designed to introduce players to the capabilities of the DualSense controller, such as adaptive triggers, haptic feedback, and the built-in touchpad.

Astro’s Playroom isn’t just a great way to learn what the DualSense controller can do, however; it’s a genuinely fun platformer in its own right. You start by flying into the PS5, and the different levels are based on the components of the PS5, with the central plaza based on the PS5’s CPU and other levels based on the GPU, memory, SSD, and cooling system.

The first glimpse of the Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour zooms in on the player’s miniature character, who is standing (you guessed it) on the surface of a Joy-Con, next to a giant Switch 2. It feels like an almost exact copy of the concept of Astro’s Playroom, but that’s where the comparisons end.

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Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is no Astro’s Playroom

Astro’s Playroom is a whole lot of fun to play

Nintendo

Astro’s Playroom is a genuinely good game. Aside from being a really clever way to introduce you to the features of the DualSense controller, it’s a ton of fun to play. The level design is great, and while the difficulty isn’t high, there are plenty of nostalgic artifacts to collect to ensure that you explore every gorgeous inch of the game.

Astro’s Playroom isn’t a long game; you can finish it over the course of a few hours, but it doesn’t feel unfairly short. It’s a blast from start to finish, especially if you’ve used some or all of the old PlayStation devices that make an appearance throughout the game. Ultimately, it’s full of charm and honestly kind of feels like a Nintendo game.

So far, we’ve only seen glimpses of Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, but it’s already clear that it’s no Astro’s Playroom. There are some mini-games and tech demos that you can play to learn about features such as the mouse controls and the updated rumble. They don’t look hugely impressive, however; while Speed Golf looks mildly entertaining, one of the tech demos literally has you shaking a maraca 20 times.

It gets even worse, however. It appears that one of the key ways you can learn about the new hardware on the Switch 2 is by wandering around and finding components with question marks above them. When you interact with them, you get a short series of slides explaining thrilling information such as where the magnets are located, because kids love reading about internal hardware, right?

It seems that Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour isn’t really a game at all. It’s more like an interactive guide to your new device, with a few mini-games thrown in to try to keep things interesting. It’s not something I can imagine spending much time with, and I certainly couldn’t ever see myself completing it like I did with Astro’s Playroom.

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There’s another major difference, and that’s the price

Do we really want to pay for a tour of our hardware?

Sony

The truly shocking thing about Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, however, is that according to the Nintendo Direct, it will launch as a paid digital game on the same day as the Nintendo Switch 2. You read that right: you’re going to have to pay for what looks like a mediocre virtual tour of your new Switch.

In comparison, Astro’s Playroom comes preinstalled on every PS5. Not only is it a vastly superior game, but it’s also completely free. Even if you don’t buy any other games, you can fire up your brand-new PS5 and immediately start playing an excellent platformer. It honestly seems like madness that Nintendo is going to charge people who have just shelled out $450 for a console even more money to play a virtual console tour.

At the time of writing, there’s no information about how much Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is going to cost. Other launch titles such as Mario Kart World are going to cost an eye-watering $79.99, and I can’t imagine even Nintendo could justify charging that much for Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour. Even if it’s only a fraction of the price, you still have to pay for a game that feels like it should be included for free.

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This feels like a missed opportunity for Nintendo

Nintendo makes incredible games, but this isn’t one of them

Nintendo

It seems very odd that Nintendo seems to have copied the concept of Astro’s Playroom (a game that takes place on the console itself) but have completely missed the things that made it great. Astro’s Playroom perfectly showcased the features of the PS5 controller, it did it in a way that was incredibly fun, and it did it for free.

Based on the few clips we’ve seen so far Nintendo doesn’t check any of those boxes. It’s hard to imagine players slogging through the entirety of Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, so there may be a lot of things that they don’t learn. In comparison, I bet there are plenty of people out there who covered every inch of Astro’s Playroom.

Developing games costs money, but Nintendo is hardly strapped for cash. While Astro’s Playroom was free, in 2024, Sony released the truly excellent Astro Bot, a standalone platformer that you most definitely had to pay for. It was another triumph, and surely at least some of the sales of that game must have come from people who played and loved Astro’s Playroom.

The whole thing is just really disappointing. Nintendo has made some of my favorite platformers ever, so they clearly have the chops to make something as good as Astro’s Playroom, and Nintendo fans would have lapped it up. Instead, we get what amounts to a fancy hardware manual, and we have to pay for the privilege.

Nintendo Switch 2

Nintendo’s Switch 2 features a more powerful chip, a higher resolution screen, and upgraded Joy-Cons.