Nintendo's virtual reality kit is a wonderfully weird way to keep children entertained

The Nintendo Labo VR kit is released for Nintendo Switch on 12 April
The Nintendo Labo VR kit is released for Nintendo Switch on 12 April

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Nintendo’s new foray into virtual reality involves holding a cardboard elephant to your face and using the trunk to paint within a digital canvas.

Nintendo is not one for the technological arms race that has defined video game VR so far, with its expensive headsets and controllers. No, an ebullient toymaker at heart, Nintendo prefer a wind-pedal that blows air into your face as you look up the backside of a bird and fly through a colourful landscape by flapping its cardboard wings. Never let it be said the Japanese gaming giant doesn’t do things its own way.

The Nintendo VR kit is thoroughly weird and quietly genius. Combining virtual reality with Nintendo’s eccentric ‘Labo’ project, which has you building meticulously engineered cardboard toys, makes a great deal of sense.

You start by building the goggles themselves, constructing a cardboard headset around a simple pair of lenses. It takes about 20 minutes or so to slot together the goggles from the pre-packaged sheets, before slipping Nintendo’s Switch console into the front.

It is a surprisingly sturdy thing, with a cardboard guard to slot over the top to prevent the Switch falling out. And as Labo has done in the past, the VR kit makes fine use of the Switch’s more esoteric technological features.

You can double tap the cardboard at the top to return to the main menu, while the Switch’s light sensor (used to auto-adjust brightness like with many phones) detects when the console is slipped into the VR goggles. This means it can switch instantly to VR mode, projecting two images to be peered at through the goggles.

There is no headstrap, with Labo VR designed to be held up to your face for short blasts rather than the all-engulfing experiences of other headsets.

It is a cute way of making VR sociable, with the idea to pass the headset around between friends and family, and has also secured Nintendo a 7+ PEGI rating. Most VR headsets are rated for those over 12 due to the weight and fully immersive nature of headsets that can lead to motion sickness, but Nintendo are determined to make its own experiment accessible to younger children.

Short blasts also help with the Switch screen’s relatively lo-fi resolution, its 720p display is a lower resolution than you would expect from most devices. But while there is definitely a less than perfect picture, with a few noticeable pixels, Nintendo’s colourful aesthetic and graphical tricks means the pictures looks better than it has any right to. While a neat acoustic trick means that the Switch’s speakers bounce sound around in the goggles which means you don’t need to wear headphones.

The Switch’s internal jumble of gyros and motion sensors mean that it works just fine as a VR headset as you move your head around your digital world. The VR kit will come with a wide selection of simple mini-games that don’t require any extra Labo toys; with you controlling your game and holding the goggles up by the Joy-Con controllers attached to either side of the console. I dipped into a Bomb Tennis game, where I moved around a small court batting bombs back to an opponent, and an arcade toy grabber game where I had to peer around to find balls, pick them up with my roving claw and drop them on a table.

And for those short blasts, it all felt surprisingly natural holding the console up rather than strapping it to my head. There is no doubt that it could get tiring after a while, but Nintendo were very keen to stress that prolonged play isn’t the point. You can also play all of the associated VR games in regular 2D, should you wish, with a separate screen holder that attaches to the toys without the virtual reality embellishment.

Nintendo Labo VR
The Nintendo Labo VR blaster

The real departure are those cardboard toys that the goggles can slot into for more involved, (and slightly bananas) games. We were limited to a selection from the starter pack at this first-look, which including the ‘Blaster’. A distant cousin of the Super Nintendo’s Super Scope, the blaster is a delightful cardboard and rubber band construction. A chunky trigger sits in the middle to fire off shots, while a shotgun-esque reload mechanism comes with satisfying thuthunk.

This being Nintendo, the main game attached to the blaster is a family-friendly, Splatoon-esque rail shooter that has you moving through a city blasting aliens. It’s good fun and surprisingly accurate. It also has a neat trick that has you flipping a switch on the blaster to activate ‘bullet time’, freezing the action for you to line up a barrage of shots before flipping the switch back and watching them all hit their targets at once.

The blaster also comes with a multiplayer spin on Hungry Hungry Hippos, where you and a pal take turns to vacuum up and launch fruit into a pool of hippos in an attempt to attract them to your designated area.

The toys all have a delightful touch of bizarre playfulness. There is an attachment with a small fan on the bottom that you blow into to control action on screen. The wind pedal can work in tandem with the bird, or has its own game when you stamp down to launch a frog in a VR platformer, the pedal gusting wind into your face as you jump. A camera, complete with working focus lens, tasks you with taking sealife snaps underwater (among other environments).

Then there is that elephant mask with the Joy-Con slipped into the trunk. You can then use the trunk to paint 3D pictures, or carefully shift platforms in a Marble Madness-like puzzle game. While I didn’t get a chance to verify it, the Nintendo rep claimed that, all-told, the elephant controller is probably the most accurate the company has made. Which just seems mad enough to be true.

But as weirdly exciting the toys are, the Labo VR kit’s real revelation could be in its update of the original Labo’s Toy-Con Garage. This customisation tool initially allowed you to program simple actions to make your own cardboard toys. The new version is expanding to full on game creation, giving you access to a suite of 3D editing and logic tools, as well as rule sets. It can apparently create anything from small virtual reality experiments, to full-blown Super Smash Bros. clones.

Quite where all this will lead is anyone’s guess. Will the VR goggles will become compatible with existing Switch games and Nintendo’s famous faces? Will the Toy-Con Garage tools break away from Labo and into its own thing? There may be some that have no interest in what is, very deliberately, Nintendo’s ‘My First VR’. But as an introduction for younger players and the VR curious, it’s hard not to be charmed at first look. And Labo is still Nintendo at is most playful and experimental; which is surely something we can all get behind.

  • The Nintendo Labo VR kit is released for Nintendo Switch on 12 April

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