Friday night, my boyfriend and I sat on the couch for a refreshing evening of doing nothing together. We tuned in at a baseball game, he picked up my guitar and I eagerly started.”Pokémon Pokopia,” the new cozy life simulator game from the 30-year-old franchise, which is unlike anything we’ve seen from Pokémon before.
I recounted my experience as I played, explaining the process of building habitats to increase the comfort levels of my Pokémon friends, the primary goal of the game.
“Onix is stuck in a cave but I can’t break the walls so Squirtle suggested we throw a rain party to soften the rocks” I said to my friend as I played. “But Squirtle and I don’t know what ‘celebration’ means, so we have to ask Professor Tangrowth what ‘party’ means.”
I was glad when I finally got wet and woke up Kyogre — but then Charmander, who calls me “bestie,” discovered that the rain makes the flame on her tail go out, so I had to build a little hut for shelter with the help of our friends Timburr and Hitmonchan.
Suddenly, it was 11:30 PM, I only looked up because the baseball game was about to end. To my horror, my friend had fallen asleep on the couch next to me.
I didn’t realize he was sleeping. I was so engrossed in building habitats for my Pokémon friends that I didn’t notice that he had stopped responding to my comment…since he was no longer awake. While he was in and out of a light snooze on the couch, I never stopped to relay a detailed play-by-play of how I was restoring a coastal habitat for Magikarp. I was completely unaware.
I was, and am, embarrassed that this happened. To my credit, I have no choice but to believe that I made this faux pas not because I’m a careless partner, but because “Pokopia” is simply a very good game, and thus, it’s not my fault that I paid more attention to the fictional Onix stuck in a cave than the real person next to me. (You should have seen how helpless that Onyx looked! How long was he stuck in there?)
“Pokopia” is like a hybrid of “Animal Crossing”, “Stardew Valley” and “Minecraft”, but takes place in the Kanto region of Pokémon, which has now become an apocalyptic wasteland. Given the bleak backdrop, it’s impressive that “Pokopia” is still firmly in the cozy gaming category.
I’m not alone in my obsession with “Pokopia”. The game appears to be so popular that it exceeded sales expectations, leading Amazon to increase costs copies of physical games by $10, reaching $80 (the game is also available as a digital download). It’s also the first Switch 2 exclusive game to be creating quite a buzz to get people to go out and upgrade to the new console.
The last few games in the main Pokémon series, like “Pokémon Scarlet” and “Pokémon Violet,” received lukewarm reception – the games were confusing and the open-world layout wasn’t interesting enough to compensate for how rushed they felt. Even as a die-hard Pokémon fan who will dutifully buy any game the franchise puts out, I’ve found the recent installments to be entertaining but lose my focus once I’ve finished the main story. However, “Pokopia” has far exceeded my wildest expectations with how expansive and thoughtfully designed it is.
There are four main areas in “Pokopia”, as well as a sandbox version of Palette Town for group play. If I had to guess, I’d say I’ve played 20 hours of “Pokopia” since it came out less than a week ago (ouch!), and I’m less than halfway through the main story. It feels wonderfully endless, even if it isn’t — but even then, I could definitely see the developers releasing additional areas to explore as part of a DLC pack, which I’d happily pay for despite the game’s already hefty $70 price tag.
Few games have put me in a state of flow like this one. It’s hard not to compare the feeling to the first release of “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” but this time, thankfully, we’re not experiencing the start of a pandemic lockdown that would change our lives forever.
A lot in the world has improved since ‘Animal Crossing’ came out — yes, coronavirus vaccines! — and yet, so much feels the same. Donald Trump is president again. The federal government is looking for armed agents among ordinary people who rally for civil rights. Extreme weather events are becoming the norm. Things are still bad.
Like “Animal Crossing,” playing “Pokopia” is an escape and a distraction, yet it’s grounded in our real world in a way that your island escape with Tom Nook isn’t.
In the post-apocalyptic Kanto region of “Pokopia”, you play as a Same amount who has morphed to look like his former trainer, who is inexplicably missing — in fact, all the humans are gone, and when you randomly appear in a cave with Professor Tangrowth, the grizzled vine Pokémon hasn’t seen another creature in years.
It’s not immediately clear what happened to cause Kanto to evolve into a barren wasteland, but as your Ditto explores the ruins and restores habitats to find new Pokémon, you come across scraps of journal entries, newspaper articles, and letters that help you piece together what happened: There was some catastrophic climate, and people perished as a result. Pikachu appears in the game as “Peakychu”, a pale creature that has lost its ability to generate electricity, and Snorlax sleeps alone in a cave for some time that has become part of the landscape, covered in moss. Yes.
The apocalyptic mystery makes each new bit of information feel more exciting, if not foreboding.
“We all know that everyone’s favorite music streaming services are being shut down one by one due to the spike in server fees around the world,” says a note from an old Poké Mart. “While music fans are still mourning the loss of these streaming services, it’s not bad news in the music world!”
The memo goes on to explain the return to CDs used by our “great-great-grandfathers,” which don’t charge a subscription no matter how many times you listen to them.
It’s funny that Nintendo is making fun of the broken music streaming model, but the part about the server costs rings a little true for now. Since the rapidly developing AI tools require so much computing power to operate, there are almost 3,000 energy-intensive data centers under construction in the US, which will add to the 4,000 already in operation. Demand for more computing power is so high that the tech industry is facing a RAM shortage severe enough to raise the price of new MacBook Pros by as much as $400.
Climate crisis? Server cost? Broken music streaming models? It’s almost like Nintendo is trying to say something about the current state of the world.
But while “Animal Crossing” is pure escapism, “Pokopia” at least gives you the sense of actually restoring a broken world. It’s unsettling to see Vermilion City in ruins — but that makes it all the more rewarding when you work with the other Pokémon to rediscover electricity and light up the landscape, overshadowing the dark clouds with a burst of light.
