Nintendo Labo review: Newest Switch accessory shows that the company might have cracked the future of fun

You keep asking yourself why. And then you open it

Nintendo has a history of making people ask why. Why make a console that can come apart and plug into a TV; why did it soldier on for so long with cartridges for games; why is Mario a plumber and wear a corresponding outfit despite not apparently having done it for decades; why the Wii U? It has never stopped, all the way up to its latest release: the Switch, which came at a risky time for the company but helped them pull off exactly what it needed.

The company's newest product, Labo, is marketed as an accessory for that console but is actually a huge box full of pieces of perforated cardboard that can be popped out, folded and assembled into a variety of accessories: everything from a small remote control car that drives around using vibration to an entire robot suit that can be strapped on to operate a virtual version of the same robot in a game. It is perhaps the company's most why-inducing release yet.

But the answer has, for the most part, always been the same. And it is the same this time, too. It did it because it is just incredibly good fun.

That much is clear as soon as you take the set out of the box, before you actually get into folding it. Instructions for assembling the cardboard are found in a game that is placed into the Switch, and it takes you through the process of doing so with all the bouncy joy that you expect of Nintendo.

It is clearly built with children in mind, though not solely for them. The instructions are clear, and make sure at all times that you're following along without patronising you. The examples that are shown on screen can be rotated and zoomed into, so that if you're ever lost you can find your place easily enough.

The games are built not only to be fun for children but to encourage genuinely astonishing kinds of learning. It combines very basic skills like spatial awareness and creativity into useful lessons like coding, building and design. But even the fun that it contains is productive and educative: children are encouraged to decorate their creations, for instance, since the cardboard it is built out of is largely plain and so can be drawn on or modified with ease.

But even the most responsible adult will find it hard not to feel some joy when they look at the inventive ways that the company have found to make these things work. That the machines could be so complex and yet made almost entirely of cardboard would be unfathomable – were it not for the fact that you have put them together, and can so trace the ways they have been built, and the fact that they can be disassembled again if you want to understand more about them.

The piano, for instance, uses a combination of the Switch's controller's built-in camera, reflective strips and a cardboard tube to allow you to actually turn knobs and change the sound. Because the knobs are cardboard, they can be swapped around for different sounds – something that even the most expensive synthesisers don't usually let you do. And they're not also made of cardboard.

Similar innovations abound throughout the Labo kit. The motorbike uses a smart collection of cardboard and elastic bands to create a throttle that you can actually twist to drive. The fishing rod uses the finely sensing accelerometers in the Switch's controllers to sense when you're turning the virtual reel, with a genuinely incredible precisio

(Getty Images for Nintendo of America)

What's more, Nintendo doesn't expect any of this to be the end. In fact, all of this is only two-thirds of the way through the company's "make, play, discover" vision for the Switch. The latter part of that refers to the ways that players are encouraged to find new ways of using the cardboard, either by modifying the things they've already made, finding new things to build out of the same cardboard kits, or doing something entirely new by using the basic programming language that Nintendo has built for Labo.

Labo is not cheap: it costs £59.99 and £69.99 for the two kits. (The robot kit, while undoubtedly the most impressive of the two boxes – it uses a complex system of weights and cameras to know where your feet and arms are, and allow you to control a robot – is also probably the most limited of them, too. So if you're buying one, I fully recommend getting the variety kit and then getting the robot one once you're done.)

But that cost isn't much more than a full Switch game, and you're guaranteed to get at least as much time out of it: given the variety of options for customisation and exploration, there's many hours of fun in each box, especially given that just building some of the "Toy-Cons" can take three or four hours.

All of that combines into something that feels like a genuine breakthrough in the casual gaming market: an accessory that brings the fun into the real world, using and developing skills that are useful for children and helpful even for adults. But to concentrate too much on the clear virtue of Labo is also to potentially forget its greatest breakthrough: it is just incredibly, surprisingly, even confusingly good fun.