Measly Game Review Archive

9.5/10 – 65 Hours at time of review

Finished on 6/18/2026, written on 8/19/2026

Life sim: 🥱

Life sim but POKEMON: 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

Jokes aside, I was not expecting to like this as much as I did. Even with my obsession with Pokemon, I usually don’t care much for the spinoffs. Even when Pokopia was revealed, it honestly didn’t look that compelling. I do love life sims like Animal Crossing, and the Pokemon skin looked cute, but I wasn’t expecting anything crazy to come out of this title. I am so happy to be wrong about that.

Pokopia has gone absolutely crazy across the gaming sphere, and it damn well deserves it. Not only is it cute, but it is a genuinely well designed game that doesn’t waste your time and gives the player nearly every tool they might need to build the society they dreamed of. Let’s break down the different ways Pokopia excels at being an actually relaxing and engaging life sim.

1. Patience

The game doesn’t rush or pressure you to do anything at all. Sure, there are tutorials and some guidance here and there, but they’re just there to introduce you to the gameplay loop or general mechanics. You could honestly spend tens of hours exploring and expanding the first area before ever leaving. Nobody pings you to remind you of what you “should” be doing, you can keep building, decorating, terraforming, farming and discovering new Pokemon friends to live with all while staying in your own corner. This is good too as the game is so large and gives you so much potential for creativity that it can be overwhelming. I found myself getting serious decision paralysis with what I wanted to do, because there was so much to do so soon. Which brings me to the next point:

2. Brilliance of the Tools

I honestly thought the protagonist being a Ditto transforming as a human was kinda gimmicky. It looked dumb, and the transformations didn’t seem very mindblowing. But actually USING them to slowly make the world your own feels so good, and you get your essential tools real quick within gameplay. Pokopia does not waste your time at all. As you naturally discover habitats and spawn in new friends, many of them will happen to be the ones that can teach you how to transform and use moves in the overworld to begin terraforming. No need to trudge through a long campaign, just go make shit happen and have fun. This is the kicker! Games like Animal Crossing New Horizons struggle to truly be relaxing because each task is a CHORE. Crafting items one by one. Tools breaking. Accidentally kicking away a path. Waiting for the right vendor to show up. It DRAGS on. Not to mention how long it takes to unlock terraforming, only for it to be finnicky in its own right. Pokopia instead lets you go wild, and it feels great.

The way these tools were introduced were brilliant as well. As you explore each area and find new obstacles to clear (hard rocks, tree stumps, mud, gaps between land, etc), you grow motivated to make as many habitats as possible to find the Pokemon that can teach you the move you need to tame the next area. The game does lead you towards these specific mons through regular gameplay, but it feels so satisfying to unlock these abilities and use them in your own way. They also give a lot of the other parts of the game a new purpose. It becomes important to have a variety of Pokemon types in each area so you can have them help you farm materials or clear obstacles. Farming becomes even more important as cooking your veggies allows you to temporarily power up your abilities, which in turn lets you explore and harvest even MORE. The loop just pulls you in and it’s a wonderful feeling.

3. “Ain’t no way bro…”

This game is MASSIVE in a way I didn’t expect. It is more than just a decorating simulator or social sim, there is expansive LORE never before touched in a Pokémon game. There are dungeons, caves with minable ores, secrets, treasure, all of which barely mentioned before release. Wanna know why we’re building a town for Pokémon? Because the humans are fucking GONE. This is a post apocalyptic world where environmental trouble has decimated the cities in Kanto and humans had to leave, leaving all their Pokémon behind in PCs or in the wild. Bit by bit you uncover snippets of lore left behind by humans through notebooks, old ads, and abandoned items / buildings. Each telling a story on how the world came to be. The player themselves are a Ditto that belonged to a trainer, and is in fact transformed into that said trainer and is spearheading the campaign to guide humans back to Earth through the town building.

On top of this, the exploration is genuinely fun and rewarding. The abandoned buildings like the S.S. Anne, Pewter Museum, and Silph Co. are so fun and fascinating to explore, with tons of materials and cool items to find inside, all of which will help you progress while fleshing out the world lore to boot. It’s such an enthralling and rewarding experience that I just wasn’t ready for this game to provide. But I gobbled that shit up. Especially once you learn how to cook burgers so that you can break hard rocks and ores in the Pewter mines. I be mining Pokemetal like nobody’s business.

4. Rewarded for Being a Pokémon Fan

This is a small thing, but the attention to detail here is astounding and is super fun to appreciate as a Pokémon fan. The different paths hinting at what city each area used to be, made more apparent by the change in overworld theme unlocked from building each Pokémon Center. The old held items you can find buried underground. The cuteness of the Pokemon and their animations. Their personality and quirks mentioned in the Pokedex actually brought to life through their dialogue and housing preferences (Zubat liking the dark, Minccino liking a clean environment, Goomy liking a damp area, Zorua teaching you how to disguise yourself). Noticing all of these is the whole orchard of cherries on top.

Despite all this, the game is still not perfect. But these gripes are so small that I’m practically nitpicking here.

• Wish there was a better way to collect materials being crafted by Pokemon in your town. Having to find them and wake them up then talk to them once more for them to remember to give you your stuff can be a little annoying.
• Moving Pokemon from one town to another can take a while, though I really don’t mind taking it slow and going for walkies
• This one is an actual problem Storage is AWFUL. There are barely any ways to sort stuff in your inventory, and ZERO ways of auto/quick sorting in chests. Plus, your only option is to just create legions of large chests and hope you don’t lose everything you’ve collected. Disposing of items isn’t really easy either especially with how many damn blocks you end up gathering in the first place.
• Wish the mouse controls let you use more than just the punching Rock Smash. I feel the other transformations can still be point and clicky. It’s a shame because Pokopia has the best use of Switch 2 mouse controls I’ve seen yet.
  • Dude even in the gripes part I’m glazing this game. It’s so good.