I have always had an adversarial relationship with alarm clocks. They are gadgets designed to ruin my most precious time, and in order to work effectively, they must be as annoying as possible. Which is why I was intrigued by Nintendo’s surprise reveal of Alarmo. (Once I got over my surprise of it not being the long-awaited Switch 2 announcement.) What if getting up in the morning could be a little more playful? Maybe what I really needed all along was Princess Zelda’s soothing voice or the chirps of tiny pikmin to ease me into consciousness in the morning.
After a week with Alarmo, I have to admit that it hasn’t changed much about my sleep patterns. It has some clever ideas, and it looks great on a shelf, but ultimately, it’s still an alarm clock.
But what a cute alarm clock it is. Alarmo is a red cylinder with a rotund white button / knob on top and a 2.8-inch rectangular LCD display with a big ol’ bezel around it that makes it almost seem circular, particularly in the dark. You can pick one of (currently) five different games — Breath of the Wild, Ring Fit Adventure, Super Mario Odyssey, Pikmin 4, and Splatoon 3 — to customize how the clockface looks and sounds, so that Link or Captain Olimar can walk around the screen. It’s the kind of thing that’s just nice to look at, and the characters even follow you around when you move in front of it.
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
Alarmo has a number of Nintendo-ized alarm features. You can choose from 35 video game “scenes” to wake up to, which range from Zelda calmly saying “wake up” to, for some reason, the sound of a pikmin drowning. Each scene starts out relatively chill and will get progressively more intense the longer you stay in bed. The top button will even start flashing colors to get your attention. Alarmo lets you customize the alarm schedule by day of the week, and it tracks your daily sleep times along with how long it takes you to actually wake up after your alarm goes off each day. All of this info is available on the clock itself; it doesn’t sync with other devices or apps.
Navigating the device is pretty easy: for most things, you simply smack the big button on top. This works for everything from turning a blaring alarm off in the morning to opening the menu to tweak settings. Otherwise, you can twist the button to adjust things — like picking the time for your alarm to go off — and there are also back and notification buttons. (So far, my notifications have all been informing me of existing Alarmo features, but in the future, it will be used to alert users for updates to add more sounds and styles based on games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons. This does require linking an existing Nintendo account to the device, the only real online feature I’ve encountered so far.)
But you shouldn’t be spending much time with those buttons because Alarmo’s big hook — aside from its Nintendo style — is its millimeter wave motion sensor. The idea is that you can interact with it simply by moving around. When it goes off in the morning, rolling out of the bed is enough to shut the alarm off. Wave your hand around a little, and it will snooze for a few minutes. In my experience, it works well enough, but with one big caveat: Alarmo’s motion sensors can’t distinguish between multiple people. So if I get out of bed but my partner sleeps in, the alarm won’t shut off.
Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
To be fair, Nintendo notes this issue right on the box (apparently animals can cause issues as well), but it does make the experience a lot less interesting if you share a bed. For most of the week, I’ve had to resort to getting up and turning the alarm off manually so that I don’t get in trouble for ruining my wife’s sleep with loud Splatoon splatters. Of course, given that a large part of the intended audience is children, this won’t be a problem for many people. Then again, my own children didn’t care much for any of the alarm or sleep tracking features anyway; they just thought it was cool having Mario on a clock. Note: this did not make it any easier to wake them up on school days.
You can also use Alarmo to help you fall back asleep. If you have a bedtime set, soothing sounds will start playing as soon as you get into bed, based on one of the five supported games (again, no button-pressing required). It has worked flawlessly for me, and I’ve become hooked on the Zelda nighttime theme, with its crackling fire and soft, intermittent piano. It’s like I’m dozing off in Hyrule Field after dark. But again, there’s an annoying caveat. For some inexplicable reason, the sounds only play for less than 10 minutes before going silent, so if you’re looking for Nintendo-themed white noise, you are out of luck. Hyrule is gone almost as soon as I finally get comfortable.
Those kinds of quirks make the actual sleep features of Alarmo feel like more of an afterthought. It’s first and foremost a $100 Nintendo-branded clock. It looks and sounds the part, which is to say, it’s incredibly charming and nostalgic. But if you’re looking for something to help you wake up better than a run-of-the-mill alarm or track your sleep more efficiently than an app on your phone, this isn’t it. Turns out, even adorable pikmin and inklings can’t change my mind about alarm clocks.
Alarmo is available to purchase early now for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers and will be released in early 2025 for everyone else.