is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
Nintendo has a history of fleshing out the larger Pokémon world through spinoffs. What games from the Pokémon Snap and Detective Pikachu series lacked in terms of action, they made up for in the way they made pokémon feel like creatures with rich lives outside of their relationships with trainers. And as the mainline series has evolved over the years, games like Legends: Z-A have begun putting more emphasis on the idea that pokémon might be better off if humans kept their distance.
Pokémon spinoffs have also tended to be relatively boxed-in, both in terms of how much space there is for you to play in and the way their stories are so self-contained. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s an aspect of these games that makes them feel small when you compare them to Pokémon Pokopia. In the new life sim, you can clearly see all of the cues co-developers The Pokémon Company, Game Freak, and Omega Force have taken from Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and Stardew Valley. But Pokopia makes its borrowed gameplay mechanics feel fresh by reimagining them through an inspired Pokémon lens.
Like most real-time games, Pokopia is a slow burn. The entire point is to meet new pokémon (instead of catching them) as you rebuild and beautify a ruined world. But as much emphasis as Pokopia puts on slowly cultivating friendships, the game gradually transforms into a sprawling adventure that you can customize however you want.
In Pokopia, you play as an unusual Ditto who gets separated from its human partner and wakes up alone in a world that initially seems devoid of other living beings. All your Ditto remembers is its trainer’s face — the game’s character customization options offer a variety of skin tones and hairstyles, but is initially limited in fashion — and it transforms into a duplicate of them because it feels lonely. Your Ditto’s trainer mimicry is convincing enough to get an old Pokédex’s face recognition working again, but what really surprises the gloopy monster is encountering an odd Tangrowth who thinks of itself as a kind of Professor and is downright shocked to meet a “human.”’
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1 / 3 Image: Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, Game Freak, and Omega Force
Unlike Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which gives you an almost entirely blank slate to work with, Pokopia drops you into a dilapidated but built-out world that’s in need of some serious restoration. When you enter the game’s first biome with Professor Tangrowth, it’s clear that the place used to be a cozy mountain town with roads, homes, and a Pokémon Center before it was all left in ruins by a mysterious disaster. You can see how the place could be rebuilt with a few carefully placed, cubical chunks of dirt, pavement, stone, and some flowers for color. But first, you and the good Professor have to tend to an ailing Squirtle who suddenly appears.
Imitating the dehydrated Squirtle and learning to wield its Water Gun attack is how your Ditto learns that it can use other pokémon’s abilities to change the terrain around it. Splashing Squirtle with a bit of water helps the monster get back on its feet, but using the move on the ground also encourages dead greenery to spring back to life. Your Ditto’s ability to beautify the world around it is what makes other pokémon want to become its friend, and in its first few hours of story, Pokopia challenges you to attract more new monsters to the once empty town, Viva Piñata-style, by creating a number of specific kinds of habitats.
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