One Of The Best Games In The Series

The alternative duo Twenty One Pilots has a song called “Drag Path,” about physical manifestations of a life that is no longer there. The term “drag path” refers to the literal path left behind by something, typically a body, that is dragged away from where it once was. As the song blew up on social media, it became the soundtrack for people’s videos about the unintended memorials to those they’d lost, such as a gift they were never able to give to its intended recipient and is still sitting by their bedside, or an unfinished project someone was working on before they met their unexpected end. 

As the chorus swells, vocalist Tyler Joseph pleads for someone to follow the drag path he left behind by digging his heels into the gravel, hopefully finding him at the end. But more often than not, a drag path is less a physical thing than it is the impact a person continues to have on others after they’re gone. Pokémon Pokopia, while billed as a cozy life sim for those who like cute vibes and wholesome interactions between their favorite critters, is tinged with the grief of Pokémon missing the humans they once stood beside, and hoping that if they can recreate the world they once knew from memory, humans might come back. 

Pokopia’s desolate version of Red and Blue’s Kanto region is full of broken-down landmarks and relics of long-absent humanity, but the greatest evidence that people were once present here is in the living creatures who wake up in this barren wasteland every day and remember them. The Ditto you play as transforms into a slightly distorted version of their trainer, who they imitate to become what is essentially a walking “Have you seen this trainer?” sign, hoping someone will recognize them and help them reunite. Professor Tangrowth, an old, wise, and greying Tangrowth, wears glasses and a makeshift head mirror, resembling the professor who saved him as a young Tangela. Chef Dente, a Greedent who was once partner to a human chef, stashes cookware in her fur and keeps the spirit of her trainer alive as she creates gourmet meals for the Pokémon rebuilding the neighborhood they once shared. 

Building a solid foundation

Pokémon has been knowingly struggling to reckon with the power dynamics of its universe over the past 30 years. The more it asserts the personhood of its monsters, the more it raises questions about the ethics of its entire capture-and-battle premise. With Pokopia taking humans out of the equation and leaving behind only a group of confused, grieving Pokémon desperately searching for their friends with childlike naivete, it cuts away all the complications and leaves one of the most raw and earnest looks at this world to ever grace a Nintendo system. Pokémon love and mourn humanity as their equals, which makes every restored landmark and town a testament to a love lost and a hope that one day it can return.

Pokopia is cute, colorful, and full of absurdist humor, giving us an unprecedented amount of face time with these monsters which, in this game, we can actually understand since we’re playing as one. But the most impactful moments are the ones that take place in relative silence. Taking a slight detour on my usual patrols and resource gathering would often have me stumbling upon something that stopped me in my tracks. Places I once gleefully walked through with Red and Blue’s chiptune soundtrack ringing in my ears were now lifeless monuments to a world ravaged by…something. 

Pokopia’s cozy townbuilding is the draw that will keep the game in people’s lives for months to come, but nothing was more motivating for me than when I would find a diary entry or magazine clipping that slowly filled in the gaps of what had happened to the Pokémon world. Even as a goal-oriented player who tends to find the idling of life sims frustrating, Pokopia’s melancholic mystery had me wrapped around its finger, with each note somehow being more devastating than the last. It’s still presented in a family-friendly way for the kiddos who just want to have cute hangs with their favorite little guys, but the underlying foundations of love, loss, and longing are rumbling under the surface of every terraformed habitat Ditto rebuilds.

The process of rebuilding this world is incredibly rewarding, not just because it feels like I’m reclaiming a place I’ve called home for decades, but because its systems are intricate and creatively fulfilling in a way that rivals the likes of Minecraft and laps the cumbersome clunkiness of Animal Crossing with a polish you’d expect from the Dragon Quest Builders 2 team. The toolset at my disposal in Pokopia is overwhelming in its flexibility, and so well regimented that it kept me from ever getting too lost in the sauce. Pokopia lets you off the leash pretty quickly, but its strict story progression gradually introduces you to its many, many systems so you aren’t overcome by decision paralysis. 

Recreating the world starts small. You’re not going to stumble into a wrecked metropolis and raise the biggest buildings from the ground in a day, and you’re not going to do it by yourself. Each of Pokopia’s areas starts by making just one area habitable for another Pokémon. A few patches of tall grass, a bed of flowers underneath a shady tree, or a handful of lily pads in a pond will attract one of the local Pokémon to your spot. They’ll tell you about a friend they once knew and what kind of environment they used to live in during the before times, and then you’ll curate the space for them to show up, too. Eventually, the whole thing snowballs and you’ve got a community of Pokémon bringing ideas, expertise, and care to the rebuilding project. 

The transforming tools we build with

But you’re not just any Pokémon in Pokopia. You’re Ditto, the Pokémon who can transform into other monsters with different abilities, making you essentially the Pocket Monster equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife. Scyther teaches you how to cut down trees, Machoke shows you how to copy its muscles to move heavy objects, Squirtle helps you keep crops hydrated by using its Water Gun, Dragonite shows you how to fly to get around quickly. You get the idea. 

Ditto is such a clever centerpiece for Pokopia because the series has an obsessive need to create a diegetic basis for everything it does mechanically. The game’s use of this versatile pink blob, who can store its inventory in its body and transform itself to perform various abilities rather than using traditional tools, is one of the core pieces that makes Pokopia work. When Pokopia was first announced, the premise of playing as a Ditto cosplaying their trainer and performing town-building duties at the behest of a Tangrowth sounded ridiculous, but it is a core tenet of what makes Pokopia such a delightful game to play, both in the endearing vibes it generates and the free-flowing, breezy building and management mechanics it supports.

Though some of Pokopia’s best quality-of-life changes are gated by upgrades, the game is leaps and bounds ahead of many of its contemporaries in just making the act of doing anything in its world pretty easy to execute from the start. Its blocky environments, while sometimes difficult to read as chunky cubes of volcanic ash can look pretty similar to chunky cubes of rocky mountainside, are still easy enough to manipulate, fix up, and sculpt into a beautiful home. The literal building blocks you’re working with in Pokopia fit together without much restriction, and even when the game is giving you structured goals to accomplish, you’re given enough freedom to get creative in how you solve the various problems caused by the elements having taken their toll on the world for years. 

Pretty much everything is plug-and-play, whether it be forming electric circuits to light up a town, creating lifts for Pokémon to use to cross great distances, or making railroads to move around quickly. Even the most elaborate infrastructures in Pokopia are simple to execute and practical in their application. Nothing in Pokopia is ever treated like rocket science, and the game goes to great lengths to teach you its systems, whether that be in a story quest or a random neighbor just telling you about a cool idea they had to make the town better.

Pokopia’s foundations are simple but sturdy, and the incredible things people have already made in the game are brilliant showcases for just how malleable and reactive its systems are. Players have made contraptions like crop-watering mechanisms that make it easier to maintain your garden without having to individually spray Water Gun on each vegetable, where others have created giant floating shrines to Arceus, the god of the Pokémon universe. People are already making cities that practically run themselves because its tools are so easy to use, and so elaborate in all the effective ways they work together.

It takes a village to make a home

In a way, those systems are not unlike the communities you build in each of Pokopia’s hubs. A bunch of seemingly incompatible parts still manage to live in cohesion together, whether in the bushes they arrive in or the homes you build for them with kits or just by putting a bunch of blocks together and slapping a door on the front.

Pokopia has hundreds of Pokémon waiting for a new home, but the game mercifully doesn’t require you to constantly manage their happiness levels to make them stick around, as if in another attempt to avoid the more alienating aspects of the life sim genre. Sure, they’ll have requests for things to make their homes nicer to live in, usually tied to their individual dispositions (a fire-type Pokémon like Torchic may want their place to be warmer than the average ‘mon home, while a rock-type one like Onix likes their space dry compared to their water-type neighbors), but you won’t find yourself babysitting hundreds of monsters across multiple biomes. Relying on them in ways I haven’t typically in the RPGs gave me a newfound love for monsters like the weird, veiny little guy Timburr, who led most of my early building projects. Magmar, meanwhile, who I’d usually seen as a bit of a doofus in the Red and Blue days, was my go-to for melting down ores to create ingots to build homes with. 

If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that meeting a Pokémon in a new context is the quickest way to get you to reconsider a monster you’d written off decades ago. That’s the magic of the series: The more new genres, stories, and perspectives it experiments with, the more potential chances you have to find a favorite. Pokopia does a great job of making even the minor characters in its world stand out by giving them memorable bits of dialogue and interactions for you to stumble upon, and making them involved in the day-to-day town management by helping build structures, break down resources, and just contribute to the city’s development with ideas and gifts.

Previous Pokémon games, such as the Mystery Dungeon games, have cast players as monsters, so this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Pokémon interacting and vibing in ways we could understand, but it is one of the most poignant. Each Pokémon brings a bit of themselves to the table by doing their part to help rebuild. Bulbasaur helps crops grow more quickly, but you might also stumble upon him having a chat with Squirtle and Charmander about how much they miss humans, and hope they’ll be able to go on adventures with them again one day. Their personalities shine through even in these dark, difficult times, and the hope that all their hard work will bring back their missing friends nudges them forward, even as they sift through the wreckage, unsure if humans will ever return. 

One of the saddest details of Pokopia’s home management is that when a Pokémon wants something to improve their living conditions, they’ll often ask for a toy, prop, or even a home appliance. More often than not, they’re not even ones that a Pokémon would use in their day-to-day lives. What’s a Piplup going to do with an alarm clock? Not a thing. That boy’s got no job to get to in the morning. But Pokémon ask for these things and often remark that they make these makeshift habitats feel like the “home” they once knew when they were living alongside their trainers. Right now, items they don’t even use or understand are more of a comfort to them than things that would be practical to them in this post-apocalyptic world. Yeah, I could offer a Pokémon a table to serve their food on and they’d be alive, but if I can find knitting supplies similar to the one their trainer used to sew them a scarf, that would be more of a comfort than shelter.

• BACK-OF-THE-BOX-QUOTE

  “Don’t judge a book by its cover (it’s sadder).”

• DEVELOPER

  Game Freak / Omega Force

• TYPE OF GAME:

  Life sim/town builder set in the Pokémon universe.

• LIKED:

  Simple, intuitive design cuts past the noise and lets you be creative, genuinely heartbreaking and poignant story, so much to do even if you’re not trying to make a metropolis.

As I’ve gotten older, one of my cool new existential obsessions has become keeping the memory of people I’ve lost alive. I’m frankly less afraid of dying myself than I am of knowing that when I go, no one will be left to remember the last walk me and my dog went on, or the final conversation I had with my father in his kitchen. Pokopia picks at this wound like I dig under dirt and ash for resources in its post-apocalyptic world, and the deeper I go, the more I find remnants of a world that no longer exists, and more waves of motivation to rebuild it.

In 2011, Charles “LaLa” Evans, a Mississippi man, turned the home he’d shared with his late wife into a museum of mementos to their decades-long marriage. Though Evans said in a 2024 interview that storms and his old age have made it difficult to maintain over the years, I think back on stories like this a lot as I play Pokopia. I have a small “shrine” on my desk to my dog who passed away in 2023, along with a tattoo of the Pokémon Herdier that I’ll take with me to the grave. Every rebuilt building in Pokopia feels like that. A real, tangible piece of evidence that Pokémon and humanity once stood beside one another, and loved each other despite their differences. Even if humans never return to the Pokémon world in Pokopia, the towns Ditto builds are a monument to the impact they left on the Pokémon who are still here. And if they do come back, the front porch light will be on to guide their path home.