I knew I was going to love Pokémon Pokopia the moment I pressed the shoulder button and – instead of whipping out a watering can, like you usually would in these kind of games – opened my mouth wide and vomited a stream of water onto the floor. Pokopia might share its DNA with the Animal Crossings, the Minecrafts, the Stardew Valleys, even the Viva Piñatas of this world, but there’s a wonderful, weirdly subversive streak that I’m finding utterly irresistible so far.
That starts, of course, with the character creator screen. Unlike most games, you’re not trying to recreate an avatar in your own image, but rather that of – in lore terms at least – a dead child. Granted, Pokopia doesn’t put it quite that bluntly, but in this post-apocalyptic version of the Pokémon universe, where humans are long gone, you’re essentially cosplaying a Ditto cosplaying the memory of their former Trainer, and it’s brilliantly, ghoulishly weird. And, of course, I stupidly named my Ditto after myself, so each time Professor Tangrowth calls my name, it’s like a little existential crisis. Am I Ditto? Am I me? Am I the half-remembered ghost of my long-rotted corpse, channeled through some other alien thing? Honestly, I love it.
And somehow, each time I think Pokopia’s settling back into more traditionally cosy rhythms, there’s another sudden jolt of strangeness. Drifloon – who, lest we forgot, feeds on the energy of stolen children – here whisks you off into a dreamworld for a bit of resource farming whenever you present it with dolls imbued with the residual of memories of their dead former owner. At one point, I stumbled across a note enthusiastically discussing the collapse of streaming services (server costs got too high, apparently!) and the resurgence of physical media. Elsewhere, I find a CCTV camera I’m told I can use to keep watch on distant Pokémon. So post-apocalyptic surveillance state here I come!
Obviously, ‘cosy’ is still the predominant vibe (this is Pokémon after all), but there’s something wonderful about the way Pokopia quietly, but enthusiastically, embraces the series’ darker side. And even as you grow accustomed to its strangeness, and its cheeriness reasserts itself, there remains a melancholy edge as you find yourself picking through the debris of once-familiar, now eerily deserted world. Pokopia has personality in abundance, and – even though it’s still relatively early days – there are already so many little touches I love. It still amuses me, for instance, that possibly the most useless move in the Pokémon pantheon is, here, the gateway to true exploratory freedom. I love, too, that the Pokémon themselves have distinct personalities, something like actual inner lives, and I even love the simple stuff, like the adorably daft way your Ditto-human’s spaghetti arms waggle as it runs.
But personality only goes so far, of course. And crucially, beneath all this, Pokopia just feels like a great game. There’s something enormously satisfying about creating habitats out of relatively basic building blocks and watching your population steadily swell, and it’s tickling the management sim fan part of my brain. Then there’s the survival-style material gathering and crafting; the obvious similarities to Minecraft, with its block-based building; the cosy customisation vibes of Animal Crossing, and the fundamental pleasures of bringing a dead world back to life, one great watery blast of puke at a time. I spent hours last night clearing sand away from Bleak Beach, and I don’t regret a minute of it.
There’s not, admittedly, much here I’ve haven’t seen before, but developer Omega Force (best known for the Warriors series, but more relevantly, also the team behind the very excellent Dragon Quest Builders series) binds it with enormous wit, elegance, and style. I love, for instance, the way cooking feeds meaningfully into your skill set, opening up new avenues for exploration. And speaking of which, the sense of discovery is strong too. I was positively giddy when I finally gained the ability to smash through rocks and a vast ocean expanse was revealed, and I genuinely gasped as I struggled to the brow of a hill, only to discover a familiar sprawl of houses, streets, even a Poké Mart lying derelict below. And the surprises, the unexpected nooks leading to bigger reveals, keep coming. I’ve dug up fossils and dead people’s junk; I’ve found a mud-caked lighthouse, strange gateways with steel shutters sealed, even a tattered magazine profiling a long-gone Trainer, which Ditto successfully turned into a new hairdo.
I’m really only just getting to the point where all the little bits that make up Pokémon Pokopia are starting to coalesce into something that feels like a cohesive whole. But even so, those bits, the way they give the game’s familiar rhythms a new tempo, work enormously well. Pokémon Pokopia is easily the most fun I’ve had with a Pokémon game in ages, and I can’t wait to bring this desolate world back to life, one heaving water-puke at a time.
