It’s 6 am and you should be waking up soon to start getting ready for work but you have a problem sleeping through your alarm, a problem that Nintendo wants to solve with its new Alarmo Sound Clock. Nintendo says Alarmo will “make waking up fun” by showing fun animations, characters, and playing sounds from some of your favorite games.
Alarmo features a motion sensor on top that responds to your body’s movements, so it knows when you’re coming out of a deep sleep and plays sounds accordingly. It also features sounds from several different Nintendo titles, including Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 3, Pikmin 4, and Ring Fit Adventure. Nintendo says more games will be added in the future, too. However, you’ll need to link your Nintendo account and connect Alarmo to the internet to download any future titles.
Nintendo doesn’t mention when future games will be available, but it does note that it’ll be starting with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. These will also be free updates you can pick up, so you won’t have to purchase them. That doesn’t mean Nintendo won’t charge for them in the future though.
The Nintendo Alarmo Sound Clock is exclusive to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers
At least, it will be initially. Nintendo is making this alarm clock available in early access. To purchase Alarmo during this period, you’ll need to be subscribed to the Nintendo Switch Online service. If that’s you, you can already place an order for Alarmo through Nintendo’s online store.
It will also be possible to buy Alarmo once it hits retailers outside of early access in 2025. As noted by XDA, it will also be available at the Nintendo physical store in New York at Rockefeller Center.
Alarmo supports gesture controls to “make the alarm quieter”
If you’ve used Google’s Nest Hub before then you’ll be familiar with the way you can wave your hand in front of it to snooze the alarm. Alarmo will do something similar with its motion sensor on top. Once the alarm starts going off, Nintendo says you can wave your hand to make the clock quieter. The motion sensor is also how the clock can recognize your body movements, which then causes it to play sounds from the game scene you picked.
For example, Mario coin sounds. The clock will also present a “visitor” from the game scene to greet you as you wake up. The visitor can also change to someone “more persuasive” if you take too long to get up. I.E. Bowser. Additionally, the alarm sounds get louder when this happens. There’s even a victory fanfare that plays once you get up completely to congratulate you on your accomplishment.
Nintendo Alarmo costs $99.99 and you can buy it from the US Nintendo online store today. It’s not the Nintendo Switch 2 news people were probably hoping for, but it is new Nintendo hardware.
