In the 30 years since Pokémon first captured imaginations worldwide with the release of Red and Blue, the franchise has not only branched into movies, television, and trading cards, but the games themselves have significantly diversified. Aside from the mainline RPGs, there are also the Mystery Dungeon games (randomly-generated dungeon crawlers), the Snap games (where the goal is to capture the best Pokémon photographs), and the Detective Pikachu games, a mystery-adventure series that formed the basis of the 2016 live-action Pokémon movie. The mainline games remain the biggest draw for most fans, but the series has proven again and again that it can switch up its formula and give players a fresh experience.
Now, the developers at Game Freak and Omega Force have given fans a brand new spin-off game that’s quickly become a sensation in its own right: Pokémon Pokopia. Described as a mashup of games like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, you play as Ditto impersonating a human being to create a utopian habitat for Pokémon left behind in the wake of Earth’s human population disappearing. For as cute as that sounds (and is), the big question in every player’s head is… what happened, exactly? And the answer the game provides sounds like it comes straight out of post-apocalyptic science fiction.
