Review: Nintendo Alarmo

Fooling Alarmo seems at first an easy task. When my 7 am alarm went off the first time, I did not get out of bed and start my day. Instead, I aggressively waved my hand in front of the clock’s sensors until an inkling from Nintendo’s Splatoon 3 stopped making horrible, gunfire-like splat sounds. Alarmo had been disarmed. I fell back asleep.

Unfortunately for me, bleary-eyed with exhaustion, Alarmo is not like the clock on my phone. A few minutes later, it woke me up again, this time more aggressively with louder sound effects. “If you don’t move, the alarm will begin again,” its screen threatened. I windmilled my arm. We repeated this process several times, until finally I gave in.

Announced earlier this month, Alarmo is the new hardware no one was expecting: a $100 clock featuring themes from beloved Nintendo properties such as The Legend of Zelda, Pikmin, Splatoon, and of course Mario. (Puzzlingly, Ring Fit Adventure rounds out the clock’s initial offerings, over more recognizable properties such as Pokémon, Kirby, or even Animal Crossing. I’ve never played a Nintendo Fit game in my life, so I skipped this theme entirely. Creepy looking characters!)

It’s a palm-size, Mario-red device with a giant white button and a toylike texture reminiscent of the Fisher Price kitchen sets I played with as a kid. It looks ridiculous on my nightstand next to my overpriced candles, hardcovers, and Urban Outfitters salt lamp. It invokes a deep, soothing sense of nostalgia that the more cynical part of my brain believes Nintendo has perfected with lab-like precision.

You may be asking yourself the same question I, a 35-year-old woman with a 401(k) and credit card debt, was when Nintendo shipped me a free Alarmo to try: Do I really need this?

Personality Machine

In 2024, when you can use your phone as both a free alarm and sound machine with very little effort, owning an alarm clock almost feels like a conscious act of whimsy. It is a choice to go out and purchase a physical device that’s sole purpose is to get you up in time for Zoom meetings, school, or that 6 am fitness class you’ve been trying to make.

Nintendo isn’t breaking the mold in offering you a clock that includes motion sensors or sound effects. It is selling you on the power of its characters. It’s selling you on personality.

At launch, Alarmo has only five themes to choose from, but Nintendo has promised more in the form of free updates—as long as you’ve connected it online and to a Nintendo account.

Its face adapts to whichever theme you choose. Super Mario Odyssey displays bold white letters with a red alarm banner and plays an hour chime that sounds like scoring coins. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild theme uses campfire and heart refill sounds.

Each theme has separate “sleepy sounds,” ambient music you can activate by getting into bed at bedtime. (Yes, you will need to tell Alarmo when your bedtime is.) While this is easily my favorite feature, there’s no way to set how long sleepy sounds play. Like it or not, you get 10 minutes, and then it’s lights out. As a troubled sleeper who relies on white noise or ambient music to drown out the world, I want those sounds to play all night long. Alarmo does not.

Wake-Up Artist

Alarmo looks like a chubby toy next to modern alarm clocks, but it has a comical, almost militant approach to waking you up. Warning screens flash across the screen when you fail to get up in time. Once you are out of bed, it scans the area to make sure you’re really up.

Oh, did you want to hop back under the covers for a little bit? Not on Alarmo’s watch. Crawl back in before an hour has passed, and the process begins again. And while it’s genuinely hilarious to make an alarm clock that refuses to let you get back into bed, a partner whose body gets lumped in with yours by the clock’s sensor might not feel similarly if you forget to deactivate the alarm. It doesn’t matter if only one of you is left; Alarmo does not discriminate.

There are ways to override the morning scuffle if you want to skip the whole fanfare. Successfully getting out of bed without having to hit that metaphorical eject congratulates you with a flash of rainbow colors. Slapping the clock’s big top button makes everything stop.

How you want to handle the alarm is up to how much external validation you’re craving that morning. Personally, I need applause to live, so, after much back and forth, I typically would get out of bed the way the clock wanted me to.

Child Time

While Alarmo has some features I truly love, it’s restrictive in how I use them. You can’t set multiple alarms throughout the day, only create a completely new one. The clock will not allow you to mix and match; you can’t listen to Splatoon’s lo-fi ambiance sleepy sounds, for example, then wake up to Zelda telling you to open your eyes.

Over the week I’ve used the clock, I’ve found myself repeatedly thinking that it’s a perfect gift for a kid: goofy, interactive, musical, and with features that reward you for successfully meeting your bedtime or getting up in the morning right away. It’s a handheld version of my mom waking me up in fifth grade and hustling me out the door.

But as an adult woman, I find myself annoyed by its rules and constantly circumventing what it wants me to do. I imagine a scenario in which I bring someone home for the first time and sheepishly have to say: “Sorry babe, don’t mind the noise. It’s just my Alarmo,” to another living, breathing adult, and find myself doing a thousand-yard stare.

Whatever attachment I’ve grown to Alarmo over the past week—and yes, there is one—taps into pure nostalgia: Memories of playing Super Mario World on the weekends with my little brother, or staying up too late to explore another dungeon in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time after my parents have gone to bed.

The thing I’m reacting to has nothing to do with the clock itself but rather the power Nintendo has to sell me my own childhood in new forms of consumption. I’d pay anything to live the simpler times of my youth again. Nintendo is asking for $100.