I'm standing in the middle of my living room. Something resembling a garter belt is wrapped snugly around my left thigh. I'm squatting, fast. I may as well be twerking. I haven't had coffee yet. I'm supposed to be working. But this week, this is my work.
It's fair to say I'm out of my comfort zone. After eight-plus years at Engadget, I'm testing my first game: Ring Fit Adventure, a new RPG for the Nintendo Switch that's out today. The game has players completing a series of full-body exercises to make their way through a scenic world. Along the way, you run (jog in place) and fly (flap your arms) to get from point A to B, and you "fight" enemies through a series of moves, ranging from squats to core work to yoga poses.
The rest of the Engadget team encouraged me to take this assignment because I'm a marathon runner. (I mostly think they wanted to see me flailing on camera.) I also enlisted testing help from my colleague Mat Smith, an avid gamer and aspiring gymnast. Together, we'd surely be excellent judges of whether a game designed to promote fitness actually succeeds on that count. Turns out, we each emerged from an hour or so of gameplay sweatier and achier than either of us expected.
I'll get to that in a moment. But first, a word on the hardware. The game comes with two peripherals: the leg strap and a resistance wheel for arm workouts. You'll need a detachable Joy-Con for each accessory: The right controller slides into a bracket on the ring, while the left gamepad slips into a pouch on the leg strap. Once you get rolling, you'll have the option of resting your finger on the right Joy-Con's IR sensor to measure your heart rate. The garter belt, as I'm calling it, uses Velcro to fasten. I found it was comfortable and stayed put; Mat (who chose more challenging game settings) says his strap slid down his thigh.
As for the ring, it has cushy hand rests are made of the same mesh material you'd find on more serious workout gear. Mat says it reminds him of yoga wheels. At various points, you'll be either pressing in on the ring or stretching it, not unlike an archer pulling a bow. In fact, navigating even basic menus often requires you to push in, which means you're going to get a bit of an arm workout no matter which difficulty settings you choose.
Speaking of the sort, there is, as you might expect, an initial calibration process. For starters, you'll enter your age, weight and sex, and you'll be asked to move around with both the leg strap and the ring. In my case, these tests suggested what I already knew to be true: that my legs are stronger than my arms, and that my biceps are stronger than my triceps. (Stretching the wheel outward is much harder for me than crushing it like some sort of She-Hulk.) There are also tutorials to make sure you've mastered the basic movements: raising the wheel overhead, "steering" the wheel to move through on-screen menus, etcetera.
