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I may work for PC Gamer, but that doesn’t stop me from dabbling in my beloved Nintendo Switch, which means that I was of course completely absorbed in every minute of this week’s Nintendo Switch 2 Direct. Including that, er, rather interesting glorified tech demo, Welcome Tour. You know, the one that everyone thought was going to be free.
Except it isn’t free. It is, in fact, 990 yen. That only works out to around $6 / £5, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the cost ends up being a little higher. And I call it a glorified tech demo, but quite frankly, that feels rather generous to what we saw of Welcome Tour. Digital manual might be the more accurate term here, as Jeremy Laird (and many, many others) put it.
Where I expected fun, tactile visual explanations I was instead met with JRPG-level tutorial popups with reams of text. I’m not entirely sure who it’s exactly for, or who’s even going to read about where the magnets are located on a Joy-Con. Even an absolute bore like me, who spends way too much time in the Goofs section of IMDB for TV shows I’m in the middle of watching, or who pauses movies to read about the personal lives of the actors in them, probably isn’t going to jump from bulletin to bulletin with any sense of glee.
The information isn’t presented in an exciting way, and even with its barebones, Flash-esque minigames, I’m not sure it deserves to earn the title of videogame. If you ask me, Nintendo should’ve taken a leaf out of Valve’s book for this one with their own spin on hardware tech demo: Aperture Desk Job.
Weaponized toilets
Aperture Desk Job was, really, Valve’s answer to Sony’s Astro’s Playroom—a free tech demo so good that Team Asobi went and made a whole game out of it. I mean hell, that was probably Sony’s answer to Nintendo’s age of pack-in titles that showed off whichever console gimmick it was working with, like the much-beloved Wii Sports. It all comes full circle.
But Aperture Desk Job is a game explicitly designed to showcase all the things that the Steam Deck can do, effortlessly weaving the handheld’s features with Portal’s humour and distinct Valve DNA. While it’s telling you how to take screenshots, bring up the Steam keyboard, and make use of its gyro controls, it’s weaving a narrative about bullet toilets and loan sharks.
It never stops you in your tracks to make you read a pop-up tutorial. Every instruction is woven into the narrative. I use the microphone to speak my name, and then the touchscreen to sign a contract. I wiggle around the joysticks, and watch the little joysticks on my in-game desk do the same. I swipe my thumb along each trackpad and watch a little ball swivel around at lightning speed. It’s bloody delightful.
It’s an incredibly short ordeal—completeable in half an hour—but it’s the perfect way of showing you everything that you can do with the Steam Deck without making you sit through an incredibly boring, wordy manual. It’s just the right level of whimsical and informative, all without overstaying its welcome. And most importantly, constantly remembering that, ultimately, it’s supposed to be useful.
That’s the recipe though, really, isn’t it? Take one or more of your most beloved mascots or worlds—Valve’s Portal, Sony’s… everything—and use that brand recognition to show off all the cool things your new piece of tech does in a way that gets people talking. And Aperture Desk Job sure got people talking.
There are Reddit posts of people actively recommending the game as both an enjoyable and informative experience. Hell, TheGamer even reviewed the damn thing. We didn’t go quite that far, mind, but our Chris Livingston wrote: “Even in just 30 minutes there’s a lot of laughs packed into Aperture Desk Job, plenty of action (your toilets aren’t the only weaponized appliances in the building), a bizarre subplot involving praying mantises, a surprising number of callback jokes, and no small amount of Aperture Science lore to absorb as you take your new invention to the boss’s office. It’s fun to mess around, too—when prompted to push a particular button, I didn’t, leading to lots of lines from Grady I would have otherwise missed.”
And here Nintendo is, up to its eyeballs in beloved game series: Mario, Pokémon, Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda. Hell, even as hard as it tries to distance itself from Miis, the people still love ’em. But what do we get? Tiny, isometric nothing people. Generic figures milling around on top of a Joy-Con suspended in the void.
It feels like Nintendo created the blueprint for how these things were supposed to work, and then completely ignored their own foundations. And even worse, are asking people to pay for its alternative, far worse invention. Aperture Desk Job didn’t cost a penny, yet it exudes far more value than Welcome Tour could ever hope.
Sure, at this point, most of us understand how a Nintendo Switch works. I doubt the Nintendo Switch 2 will be so staggeringly different that I’ll need an entire toilet-crafting narrative to better understand its intricacies. But that doesn’t mean Nintendo couldn’t have tried, even a little bit, to bottle lightning twice and make another thing that was on a Wii Sports level.
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Kurt Indovina
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