Unless Nintendo delivers on a Switch 2 sequel to Ring Fit, the days of bouncing around the living room in order to play a major console game seem pretty much over. The Switch Joy-Cons possess the motion-control abilities of the Wiimote without the zeitgeisty software to match. (Sorry, Switch Sports.) We are now 15 years out from the failed experiment of Kinect, and only the VR nuts have anything decent to say about PlayStation Move.
In the end, the sofa beat the hope of getting off our gamer butts. But the Nex Playground offers a glimmer of hope to those of us who need to burn off some energy. Mainly, actual kids.
Launched by techno-tainment company Nex in 2023, the Playground is a small cube-shaped console that uses a wide-angled lens to bring motion-tracker gaming back to life. Nex previously developed the Active Arcade app, which allowed for Kinect-style gameplay via mobile phone, and HomeCourt, the basketball personal trainer app, before venturing into the console space.
The Playground is an obvious next step in Nex’s evolution: Loaded with a handful of titles, with a subscription service to unlock even more playable content, the walled-garden device serves an immediate purpose alongside my Switch 2, Xbox, and PlayStation. Based on testing it for a few weeks, I quickly realized this was not a console for high-quality gaming, but rather, high-impact time-killing. If my entire family is trapped inside on a rainy day, we immediately turn on the Playground. And there’s been a lot of rain this summer.
The core Playground starter pack might sound pretty pedestrian: There’s a soccer shootout, a Beat Saber-esque rhythm game, a riff on Whack-a-Mole, a party game pack, and a port of Fruit Ninja that ups the finger-swiping to full-blown karate-chop action. Expansions open the door to a slew of tie-in games, fitness apps, and slightly more intricate puzzlers. For my test team — that would be me, a 7-year-old, and a 3-year-old — nothing achieved the transcendent glory of Wii Sports golf or the shitpost-worthy zaniness of Kinect Star Wars. But as a full package, simulating the run-from-one-arcade-game-to-the-next, the Playground delivered a solid hour or two of fun at a time, without feeling like we were spending our entire day sinking into a couch cushion. We were moving, we were flailing, we were laughing our butts off.
There are some standouts that Nex has rolled out so far (its latest updates arrived mid-July): In its pursuit of Wii nostalgia, the company has successfully crafted the most realistic, user-friendly version of bowling I have played since Wii Sports. On one specifically tragic day in June, when my fam failed to secure reservations at our nearby alley, we turned to Bowling Strike, which even has a bumpers mode for the littlest competitors. Loads of customization and unlockables level the game up from what you might expect to be a must-have tossed-off ripoff. There will be fights over who gets the pink ball, but that’s just part of the experience.
With kids of a certain age, you spend a lot of time trudging through crap platformers based on Paw Patrol. Nex Playground has its own slate of IP attention-grabbers — a party game based on Gabby’s Dollhouse, a Care Bears-themed runner, and a sidescrolling TMNT that requires some ninja-like reflexes were all highlights — but having to actually get up and do something goes such a long way in avoiding mind-melt. My kids jumped at the chance to appear on screen with Gabby rather than watch yet another episode of the Netflix series.
All the games in Nex Playground were easy enough to play with kids, even if no one could compete with my anime baseball skillz, resulting in occasional tears. (Parents: Maybe sit back and watch instead of pwning your own children.) But one game that even I got sucked into playing solo was Aeon Guard, which casts the player as a spellcaster defeating incoming waves of monsters. The motion controls turn you into Doctor Strange as you conjure magic that either attacks or defends against the hordes. I will never sink 60 hours into Aeon Guard, but I will sink 60 minutes into an activity that will leave my kids utterly impressed with my hand-waving abilities.
Nex has made motion activity its business, and the results are low-key astounding, as the camera accurately tracks nuanced movement and recognizes players based on how they drift around the room. My test subjects are not the most seasoned gamers or rule-followers, and could often be found in the wrong places at the wrong times, and the Playground was still picking them up — or pausing until they followed the directions on the screen. Loading up the Playground was an effortless task — especially when we asked the kids to try it on their own — and they rarely encountered mid-game browsing issues or game setup that required parental interference. A simple remote system allows the parent/child ringleader in the room to click through menus if the hand-activated buttons become too cumbersome or attention spans are running thin.
What really hit me toying around with Playground is that there really is nothing like this, despite all the attempts over the last 20 years. The Switch 2’s big level up in motion control is a mouse that is totally foreign to my Gen Alpha gamers who have no basis for PC gaming. They live for Ring Fit, but aren’t the biggest fans of mountain climbers and tricep kickbacks — they prefer fun. So the Playground fills a humungous gap in filling our weekends and late summer evenings when the sun will simply not set early enough for bedtime grr. It’s not inexpensive for a device that will only play its bespoke content — the console runs $250, with play passes running $89 for a year of gaming, or $49 for three months — but italso might be $100 for a family of four to go actual bowling on a rainy day.
Also, I am much better at anime baseball than any real sport. Take that, kids.
The Nex Playground is out now. A version of the device was provided by Nex for review. Valnet Inc. has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Valnet Inc. may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
