Pokopia has hit the headlines recently as being one of the first Switch 2 must haves, with fans flocking to stores to pick up the console in order to dive in.
It probably goes without saying, but Nintendo didn’t send us a code for this one. Instead our author decided to write something up from their own library. And, why not?
I do not even know where to start when describing Pokopia. It’s a Pokemon flavoured chore simulator, is maybe the best way to put it? That doesn’t sound appealing in the slightest, and honestly, it’s the same problem I come up with when I try and describe to my “gamer” friends why I like Animal Crossing so much. Yes, all I do is log on and hope that by artfully arranging some grass and flowers I can get a new friend to wander around my little plot of land doing not much of anything. Would I rather go save the galaxy? Eh, in about 30 minutes. I’m just waiting for Scyther to finish chopping wood.
You are a Ditto. You wake up (almost) all alone and discover not only has your Trainer vanished, but so has the rest of humanity (and a bunch of Pokemon too). Luckily, your new friend, Professor Tangrowth, tells you that if you make the area nice enough, surely all the humans and Pokemon will just reappear like magic.
So how do you make the area nice? You water dried ground, plant grass and trees, maybe even do a bit of light landscaping. This forms the core loop of my first few hours. Find a Pokemon, it wants something that can only be attained by X skill, figure out that a Pokemon with X skill likes this kind of environment, create that environment, find that Pokemon and figure out it wants something that can only be attained by Y skill. It’s monotonous and mind-numbing, but… not in a bad way?
This is an excellent brain-off game. Look at the cute things as they dance and tell you what a good job you’re doing. Oh look, two hours have passed. Pokopia follows the real world day/night cycle to a point, and major “building” jobs or certain activities take real world time to complete. This isn’t designed in a microtransaction-selling way, more in a “maybe you should take a break” way that is honestly appreciated. Whilst waiting for these timers to tick down, you can still do other things, but this temporary halt on big objectives introduces a natural end point for a session that I honestly think is quite healthy for these sorts of games.
Very early on, you’ll be given access to a PC, which has within it a store and challenges. Complete challenges to unlock coins, spend coins in the store. Each real world day, there’s a set of rotating challenges (and items) that reset every 24 hours, so there is very much an incentive to nip on for 30-60 minutes a day and just catch up with your “island” (I have to borrow the Animal Crossing term here, because I can’t think of what else to call it).
As you progress, you get the ability to travel to different areas and set up settlements there, and each area has its own set of flora and fauna. For the first few hours, I was a little bored of the loop, but once you have your initial set of skills (watering, cutting, breaking) it all starts to fit into place. If you’re ever stuck for what to do, Tangrowth can be asked for a next step, but at no point have I ever needed to do more than just check out the “Request” tab to point me in the right direction.
Getting Pokemon to join your settlement means building them a habitat. Sometimes you do this after you’ve met the Pokemon, sometimes before, but regardless you will typically be given a hint in the form of an image of what the environment looks like, and it’s easy to identify what items you need to put in a specific area in order to get the game to recognise it as that habitat. If Pokopia wants you to recruit a specific Pokemon (or that Pokemon wants to move in), it will always provide you with one of these hints, but you can also purchase additional ones from the PC store.
Honestly, if you have even a slight bit of whimsy in your heart, this game will pull a smile out of you. The writing is funny and charming, the art style and animation is adorable, and the entire package has a very all-ages appeal to it (not in the dirty joke in a children’s film way, more in the “somebody brought my child a LEGO set, why am I enjoying building it as much as they are?”).
If it makes a difference to you at all, if you buy the game physically it is produced on a “Game Key Card”, which is in fact just a line of code to tell the Nintendo Store you own the game. I know a lot of people take umbrage with this, and it very much causes an issue with game preservation, but it is also the way Xbox/Playstation games have worked for ages so Nintendo is not solely to blame for this so-called innovation.
Pokopia was reviewed on a Nintendo Switch 2.
