On Friday night, my boyfriend and I sat on the couch for a refreshing evening of doing nothing together. We tuned into a baseball game, he picked up my guitar, and I eagerly booted up “Pokémon Pokopia,” the 30-year-old franchise’s new cozy life simulator game, which is unlike anything we’ve seen from Pokémon before.
I narrated my experience as I played, explaining the process of constructing habitats to increase the comfort levels of my Pokémon friends, a primary objective 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 told my boyfriend as I played. “But Squirtle and I don’t know what ‘celebration’ means, so we have to ask Professor Tangrowth what it means to ‘party.’”
I rejoiced when I finally made it rain and awakened Kyogre — but then Charmander, who calls me “bestie,” discovered that the rain makes the flame on its tail go out, so I had to build a little hut for shelter with the help of our pals Timburr and Hitmonchan.
Suddenly, it was 11:30 p.m. I only looked up because the baseball game was about to end. To my horror, my boyfriend had fallen asleep on the couch beside me.
I did not realize he was asleep. I was so engrossed in building habitats for my Pokémon pals that I didn’t notice that he had stopped responding to my commentary … since he was no longer awake. While he drifted in and out of a light couch snooze, I had never stopped relaying a detailed play-by-play of how I was restoring a seaside habitat for Magikarp. I was completely oblivious.
I was, and am, embarrassed that this happened. For my own good, I have no choice but to believe that I committed this faux pas not because I am an inattentive partner, but because “Pokopia” is simply too good a game, and thus, it is not my fault that I paid more attention to the fictional Onix stuck in a cave than the actual human being 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, but set in Pokémon’s Kanto region, which has now become an apocalyptic wasteland. Given the bleak setting, it’s impressive that “Pokopia” is still firmly in the category of cozy gaming.
I’m not alone in my obsession with “Pokopia.” The game seems to be so popular that it surpassed sales expectations, leading Amazon to bump the cost of physical game copies by $10, bringing it to a whopping $80 (the game is also available as a digital download). It’s also the first Switch 2 exclusive game that is generating enough buzz to make people go out and upgrade to the new console.
The last few main series Pokémon games, like “Pokémon Scarlet” and “Pokémon Violet,” were met with lukewarm reception — the games were buggy, and the open-world layout wasn’t quite intriguing enough to compensate for how rushed they felt. Even as a lifelong Pokémon fan who will dutifully buy any game the franchise puts out, I’ve found the recent installments to be fun, but they lose my attention once I complete the main storyline. Yet “Pokopia” has far exceeded my wildest expectations with how expansive and thoughtfully designed it is.
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