‘Pokémon Pokopia’ is even better than ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’

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 thirty-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 PM. 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 must he have 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 overcome how rushed they felt. Even as a life-long 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.

There are four main regions in “Pokopia,” plus a sandbox version of Palette Town for group play. If I had to guess, I’d say I’ve played a solid twenty hours of “Pokopia” since it came out less than a week ago (whoops!), and I am less than halfway through the main story. It feels gloriously endless, even if it’s not — but even then, I could definitely see the developers releasing additional regions to explore as part of a DLC, which I would gladly pay for despite the game’s already high price of $70.

Few games have enraptured me in a flow state like this. It’s hard not to compare the feeling to when “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” first came out, but this time, we thankfully are not experiencing the onset of a pandemic lockdown that would change our lives indefinitely.

A lot in the world has improved since “Animal Crossing” came out — yay, coronavirus vaccines! — and yet, so much feels the same. Donald Trump is president again. The federal government is siccing armed agents on ordinary people rallying for civil rights. Extreme weather is becoming the norm. Things still feel bad.

Like “Animal Crossing,” playing “Pokopia” is an escape and distraction, yet it’s grounded in our actual world in a way that your island getaway with Tom Nook is not.

In the post-apocalyptic Kanto of “Pokopia,” you play as a Ditto who has transformed to look like its former trainer, who is inexplicably missing — in fact, all of the humans are gone, and when you randomly appear in a cave with Professor Tangrowth, the greying vine Pokémon hasn’t seen another creature in many years.

It’s not immediately clear what happened that made Kanto evolve into a barren wasteland, but as your Ditto explores the ruins and restores habitats to find new Pokémon, you encounter scraps of diary entries, newspaper articles, and letters that help you piece together what happened: there was some sort of disastrous climate event, and as a result, all of the humans are gone. Pikachu appears in the game as “Peakychu,” a pale creature who lost its ability to produce electricity, and Snorlax has been solitarily sleeping in a cave long enough that it’s become part of the landscape, covered in moss. Yikes.

Image Credits:Pokémon Pokopia

The apocalyptic mystery makes each new morsel of information feel more exciting, if not foreboding.

“We all know that everyone’s beloved music streaming services are being forced to shut down one by one due to the steep rise of server fees all over the world,” one note from an old Poké Mart says. “While music lovers are still mourning the loss of these streaming services, it isn’t bad news in the world of music!”

The note continues to explain the return to CDs that “our great-great-grandparents” used, which don’t charge a subscription fee, no matter how many times you listen to them.

It’s funny that Nintendo is poking fun at the broken model of music streaming, but the bit about server costs feels a bit too real for this moment. Since fast-growing AI tools require so much computing power to operate, there are nearly 3,000 energy-intensive data centers under construction in the U.S., which will add to the 4,000 already in operation. The demand for more computing power is so high that the tech industry is facing a RAM shortage severe enough to bump the price of new MacBook Pros by up to $400.

Climate crisis? Server costs? Broken music streaming models? It almost feels as though 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 sensation of actually rehabilitating a broken world. It’s unsettling to see Vermillion City in ruins — but that only makes it more rewarding when you work with the other Pokémon to rediscover electricity and illuminate the landscape, eclipsing the dark clouds with a burst of light.