Pokémon Pokopia is the cozy game I've been looking for — and it's worth buying a Switch 2 to play

As someone who learned to read by playing Pokémon Red and Blue as a kid, I figured Pokémon Pokopia would make me feel old. Then I learned the Pokédex had been upgraded with a selfie camera, and I promptly shriveled to dust.

Pokopia, a collaboration between Game Freak and Koei Tecmo's Omega Force, delights in this mash-up of old and new, of nostalgia reformed for a new generation of trainers to tap into that same bright-eyed sense of wonder and discovery while scrounging the reanimated, blocky corpse of the Kanto region. It’s a lot cozier than it sounds. It also marks the first game I think is worth upgrading to a Nintendo Switch 2 for, after Mario Kart World and even Pokémon Legends Z-A fell short for me, though I do appreciate the latter’s rightful return of my favorite Pokémon: Scrafty.

Playing Pokopia took me back to the franchise’s early days, an era of bizarre spin-offs when anything could be a Pokémon game if it showed off Nintendo hardware. (Does anyone else remember Pokémon Channel?) I had my fingers crossed that Pokopia would be the latest in a long line of cozy life sims like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing that I could easily lose hundreds of hours in. And I was not disappointed.

Pokémon Pokopia: The basics

• What is it? A spin-off of Game Freak’s long-running creature collector RPG series that ditches turn-based combat for crafting and building in a block-based world
• Who's it for? Pokémon fans and anyone who enjoys cozy life-sim games
• What's the price? $69 on Nintendo Switch 2
• What other games has the developer made? Pokémon Pokopia is co-developed by longtime franchise stewards Game Freak (Pokémon Scarlet/Violet, Pokémon Legends: Z-A) and Omega Force (the team behind the Dynasty Warriors series, and Pokopia-like Dragon Quest Builders 2).
• What games is it similar to? Pokémon Pokopia is similar to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, with a block-based terraforming system like Minecraft

On the road to Viridian City

Pokopia is a bold departure for Game Freak’s iconic series, trading turn-based battles for a slower, more slice-of-life experience where you transform a desolate land into a Pokémon paradise. You use classic Pokémon moves like Cut, Rock Smash, and Water Gun to shape the terrain and build habitats to attract wild Pokémon in the hopes that, eventually, some humans will come to live alongside them. Because, yeah, all the humans got raptured or something? The game keeps this plot point delightfully vague, a trend of cultivating mystique in the silliest way possible that continues throughout.

There are four sprawling regions to explore, plus a sandbox-style Palette Town, and each map can be shaped how you see fit. An already addictive gameplay loop is made even more so by magnetic storytelling that takes cues from the best Studio Ghibli movies, threading intrigue through small moments. You’re also fueled by a growing cheering squad of Pokémon who call this place home, each of whom gets tagged in to help in one way or another. It makes the building process feel collaborative, even if the more sugary dialogue threatens to rot your teeth at times.

So much room for activities

If you take anything away from this review, it’s that Pokopia is a massive game. The map gets exponentially bigger as you unlock new areas and discover different biomes. Just when I’d start to think I’d finally mapped out the game’s furthest edges, I’d stumble on a gateway to some new vast corner, and my jaw would hit the floor again.

A few familiar friends, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, and Charmander, help you get started with moves to plant grass and shoot water. You unlock more moves to smash rock and otherwise terraform the environment into habitats that attract certain Pokémon. You can find clues about habitats you’ve yet to discover scattered around the map. A field of flowers by itself will attract a Combee, for instance, but if you plant them around a gravestone, a Cubone will show up.

From there, you can build your new Pokémon friends bigger and better homes with skills tied to each one’s type or build, like a Charmander’s flame or Scyther’s blades to turn logs into lumber. There are also dream islands you can cannibalize for raw materials, which is super convenient.

That core gameplay loop — cultivating habitats to get more Pokémon to build more things to unlock new abilities, decor, and areas where you get even more Pokémon — is what really sucked me into Pokopia. Terraforming each new biome plays out the same while adding in new systems to keep things feeling fresh, like mining and smithing. My favorite area, Bleak Beach, introduces you to Pokopia’s surprisingly sophisticated electrical system, which holds such potential for cool designs that I was half-tempted to start mine over from square one.

All the while, you’re stumbling on new Pokémon who talk as if they’re in “The Big Lebowski.” Some from the original 151, like Growlith, really made me smile. I begged my mom for a dog growing up; finding him on my Game Boy at the playground was the next best thing. Longtime fans get thrown a bone now and again with new twists on familiar favorites like Mosslax and Peakychu (Get it? Because he’s a ghost type?).

These pure nostalgia bait callouts are abundant and, unfortunately, darling as all get out. You excavate CDs of music from Pokémon games and turn ancient artifacts into Super Repels, Potions, and other Poké Mart staples. Implying that with the absence of humans, so too went the need for battles. However, I expect that when the humans return, with the next mainline Pokémon game, so too will the cartoon violence. But for now, in this moment, we can catch ‘em all in blissful peace.

Pokopia grows on you, yo

At first, I thought I’d lose interest in Pokopia solely because the dialogue feels plucked from a PBS show, even by Pokémon standards. I was bored to tears by the villagers in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, robbed of their sassiness and personality in earlier games, and Pokopia strikes a similar chord.

I vastly underestimated how charming the Pokémon’s bizarre peppy surfer bro talk could be. After I found a Magikarp that ended every sentence in “yo,” I was smitten. That vibe flows naturally with the collaborative effort of building each ecosystem up, brick by brick. Your Pokémon graduate from habitats to grass sheds to little cottages and villas complete with electricity, barter economies, CD-ROMS, etc., and they’re cheering you on all the way. It brightens my day more than it has any right to, dag nabbit.

A crucial element of this formula is its real-time mechanic. Pokopia periodically tells you to put down the controller and stop playing. Each building takes several IRL hours to complete, and while you could manipulate your console’s internal clock to skip ahead….that’d be cheating, man. I found myself doing just that in the race to complete this review ahead of embargo, and it did something I never thought possible: It turned playing Pokémon into something I hated doing. Don’t lose the plot like I did, dear reader. Touch grass.

Klingklang clunky UI

Pokopia dodges several common pitfalls of the life-sim genre with common-sense quality of life features. You can suck up multiple items at once, Kirby-style, for instance, or set up webcams to keep an eye on habitats you’re looking to lure certain Pokémon to. There’s a bag upgrade that lets you easily access certain items in your inventory. Y’know, the kind of little tweaks that, after hours of playing, eventually become so handy, I can almost forgive the infuriating, clunky storage system.

I hope later patches streamline this headache in some way, but for now, it sucks rifling through a million unmarkable chests searching for that one ingredient you know you have tons of if you can ever find the damn thing.

Should you play Pokémon Pokopia?

I did not expect to be as smitten with Pokémon Pokopia as I have become. I really would not have been surprised to find some unholy clone of Animal Crossing and Minecraft, especially given how uncanny some fans have found its protagonist: a Ditto transformed into a dopey-looking human. Instead, I can’t wait to play more. I’m excited to turn the beach area into a tribute to my mom, a beach bum who never played the games but watched her three daughters fall headfirst into a decades-long obsession, led by yours truly after seeing a Squirtle on a Lunchables box. (Her favorite Pokémon was Pikachu.)

I can’t wait until my niece is old enough to play this game with me. She was born the day before my mom died. I can’t wait to find out her favorite Pokémon, too.