On Friday night, my boyfriend and I relaxed on the couch for a cozy evening of doing nothing together. We watched a baseball game, he played my guitar, and I excitedly launched “Pokémon Pokopia,” the new life simulator game from the 30-year-old Pokémon franchise, which is unlike anything we’ve seen from Pokémon before.
As I played, I narrated my experience, describing how I was constructing habitats to improve the comfort of my Pokémon friends, a key goal of the game.
“Onix is stuck in a cave, but I can’t break through the walls, so Squirtle suggested throwing a party to make it rain to soften the rocks,” I explained to my boyfriend. “But Squirtle and I don’t know what ‘celebration’ means, so we have to ask Professor Tangrowth what it means to ‘party.'”
I celebrated when I successfully made it rain and awakened Kyogre — but then Charmander, who calls me “bestie,” discovered that the rain extinguishes the flame on its tail, so I had to construct a shelter with the help of Timburr and Hitmonchan.
Suddenly, it was 11:30 p.m. I looked up only because the baseball game was nearing its end. To my surprise, my boyfriend had fallen asleep on the couch beside me.
I hadn’t realized he was asleep. I was so absorbed in building habitats for my Pokémon pals that I didn’t notice he had stopped responding to my commentary… because he was no longer awake. While he drifted in and out of a light nap, I continued sharing a detailed play-by-play of how I was restoring a seaside habitat for Magikarp, completely oblivious.
I’m embarrassed this happened. I have to believe that I didn’t commit this faux pas because I’m an inattentive partner, but because “Pokopia” is such an engaging game, and it’s not my fault I focused more on the fictional Onix stuck in a cave than the person beside me. (You should’ve seen how helpless that Onix looked! How long had he been stuck in there?)
“Pokopia” is like an “Animal Crossing,” “Stardew Valley,” and “Minecraft” hybrid, set in the Pokémon Kanto region, now an apocalyptic wasteland. Despite the bleak setting, “Pokopia” firmly belongs in the cozy gaming category.
I’m not alone in my obsession with “Pokopia.” The game is so popular it exceeded sales expectations, prompting Amazon to increase the physical game copies’ price by $10, reaching $80 (the game is also available digitally). It’s also the first Switch 2 exclusive game generating enough interest to encourage people to upgrade to the new console.
The recent main series Pokémon games, like “Pokémon Scarlet” and “Pokémon Violet,” received lukewarm responses — the games were buggy, and the open-world layout wasn’t engaging enough to compensate for feeling rushed. Even as a lifelong Pokémon fan who will buy any franchise game, I found the recent entries fun but lost interest after completing the main story. Yet “Pokopia” has exceeded my expectations with its expansive and thoughtfully designed content.
“Pokopia” includes four main regions and a sandbox version of Palette Town for group play. I estimate I’ve played around 20 hours since its release less than a week ago and am less than halfway through the main story. It feels gloriously endless, even though it’s not — but I could see the developers releasing additional regions as DLC, which I would gladly purchase despite its $70 price.
Few games have engrossed me like this. It’s hard not to compare the experience to when “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” first launched, but thankfully, we’re not experiencing the onset of a pandemic lockdown this time.
Many things have improved since “Animal Crossing” came out — yay for vaccines! — yet so much remains unchanged. Donald Trump is president again. The government deploys armed agents against ordinary people rallying for civil rights. Extreme weather is now normal. Things still feel grim.
Like “Animal Crossing,” playing “Pokopia” offers an escape, grounded in reality more than your island getaway with Tom Nook.
In the post-apocalyptic Kanto region of “Pokopia,” you play as a Ditto transformed to resemble its missing former trainer — in fact, all humans have vanished, and when you randomly appear in a cave with Professor Tangrowth, the vine Pokémon hasn’t seen another creature in years.
It’s not immediately apparent what led to Kanto becoming a barren wasteland, but as your Ditto explores the ruins and restores habitats, you find diary scraps, newspaper articles, and letters that shed light on the disaster: a climate event caused humans to vanish. Pikachu appears as “Peakychu,” a pale creature lacking electricity, while Snorlax sleeps in a cave long enough to be covered in moss. Yikes.
The apocalyptic mystery makes every clue exciting, if not ominous.
“We all know