Pokémon Pokopia is the most addictive cozy citybuilder I have played in years. That’s both its biggest strength, and one of its biggest accessibility weaknesses.
Trying to describe Pokémon Pokopia to someone who hasn’t played it involves a bit of genre comparison word salad. It’s a little bit Animal Crossing, a little bit Minecraft, and a heaping serving of Viva Pinata. Mostly it’s the Dragon Quest Builders 3 that Koei Tecmo never greenlit, with a Pokémon coat of paint and collectathon reskin.
In Pokopia you play as ditto, a pink blob Pokémon with the ability to shapeshift and transform to mimic other creatures. Long since abandoned by your human trainer, you shapeshift into a goofy-faced approximation of that human, and set about trying to restore the remains of a damaged world, bringing life back to nature.
While on the surface the game is a cute and wholesome traditional cosy game, there’s a darker narrative undercurrent present about how a world that will be recognisable to classic Pokémon fans became so unrecognisable, and the fate othat has befallen humanity in a post apocalyptic world seemingly completely abandoned.
Also it’s weird and silly in a very endearing way. Watching Ditto suck up items into their wide stretched mouth, then regurgitate them to retrieve them for use is baffling and charming in equal measure.
The core gameplay loop is as follows – Across a number of biomes you’re tasked with restoring an area to a healthy state (watering the grass, cleaning up oil spills etc), rebuilding the landscape, and building habitats to entice specific Pokémon species to move in (four squares of grass by a river vs four squares in a field will attract different species). You then build and furnish homes for those Pokémon to live in that meet their personal preferences, mine resources, farm, and use your Pokémon’s specific unique abilities to process materials or complete community projects, craft items, undertake construction projects, and unlock new abilities for your Ditto.
Despite being an officially branded Pokémon game, Pokopia is published by Koei Tecmo, and developed by the team behind Dragon Quest Builders 2. As a result the game has more options in its settings menu than typically seen in a mainline series Pokémon title.
Players can alter text speed, toggle off controller rumble, switch the run and jump buttons on the default control scheme, and set radial wheels to require an A button press to confirm selection rather than activating on a held button release.
By default, players can turn either the left or right Joy-Con on its side and use it like a mouse, allowing for more precise control over where to aim when placing or destroying blocks. However, if you need to be able to place your controllers on their side for accessibility reasons, without wanting to activate the mouse mode cursor, there is a toggle to turn off mouse support entirely.
Additionally, players can remap their button layout in game, alter camera speed, inversion, and distance, set the camera to auto adjust (either to prevent obstacles obscuring your view or to automatically follow behind the player character), as well as tweaking audio via a number of sliders.
Additionally the game features a few inherently accessible design choices, such as on screen reminder text that appears if you spend a few moments not moving in game, and a colour scheme built out of highly distinct colour coding.
There are, however, some design choices made with Pokopia which are going to be inaccessible for players with certain cognitive disabilities.
At least early on in the game, locating specific Pokémon in an environment can be a bit of a challenge if you struggle with memory issues. Certain Pokémon will be important to keep coming back to for progression tasks, such as species which can turn logs into lumber, clay into bricks, or creatures with building site specific abilities.
One of your earliest tools for locating Pokémon that you’ve lost track of is Honey, a consumable item which will, if used near a Pokémon’s home habitat, cause them to run to your location. While this is useful, the game doesn’t do a great job of highlighting this functionality, and using this item will require you to remember where a Pokémon’s home habitat is before you can summon them to there, which may be a challenge if you struggle with memory difficulties.
There are abilities such as Teleport and Fly which can help bring you directly to a specific Pokémon, but these are creature abilities that you’re not guaranteed to come across, as they’re often tied to random encounters with rare Pokémon spawns. I am aware of both abilities, but I have yet to find a Pokémon with either of those powers myself despite approaching the end of the game’s fourth major area, and having well over 100 species of Pokémon discovered.
The ability to open a map showing either the current location or home habitat location of all unlocked Pokémon in a given biome would do a lot to help make the game more cognitively accessible.
However, Pokopia’s biggest positive selling point is also one of its biggest potential cognitive accessibility barriers. The game has a deeply compelling, potentially compulsive, “never quite done with my tasks” gameplay structure.
While playing Pokopia, there’s pretty much always a bunch of simultaneous tasks that the game wants you to complete, and as you tick one task off of your list the game will inevitably give you another to replace it. That’s great in some regards, but it does make finding a natural stopping point to put the game down potentially challenging for some compulsive or completionism prone players.
When you first enter a new area there’s going to be stuff to clean up, broken buildings to repair, environments to explore that sprawl far further than expect, and quests to complete. Many quests are multi-part, meaning you’ll go to an NPC to report your quest as complete, and then be given the next part of that quest before dialogue has even ended. There’s resource production timers, timers for building completion, and timers for when specific creatures can spawn into the game.
It’s really easy to fall into a loop playing Pokopia that looks something like this – I have a building that’s going to take me an hour to build, so I decide during that hour to start working on gathering materials for a second building task that’s going to need overnight to complete. That new building task requires a number of processed materials, so I go down into the mines to start collecting the ore to bring to the smelter. I don’t have a recipe for a second smelter yet so I’m going to need to set one material type smelting, then wait for it to complete before starting on smelting the second. The first material is going to take a long time to smelt, so I pick up a Pokémon sidequest while I wait, and start working on decorating my house. By the time that I complete that sidequest, then get back to the smelter and set my second material smelting, then pick up another sidequest to complete during that smelting session, then go back and collect my second smelted material batch, that one hour counter has long since passed. I perhaps only intended to play for an hour, but ended up playing for an hour and half, maybe closer to two hours, because it made sense to do tasks while that timer was running, even if those tasks led to other tasks which led to other tasks which then overran, and at that point I was so close to setting up an overnight build that I might as well keep going, because otherwise I’m not going to finish that building project until a day later if I don’t set it building today.
It’s the kind of game that’s very easy to lose track of time with, and to let “just one more task” get away from you until you’ve played for far longer than intended. If you’re the kind of person who needs a feeling of closure to put a game down, like you’ve found a naturally sensible stopping point where everything is complete and you’re done with all your tasks, you may struggle with the way that this game makes it hard to ever feel like you’ve finished all of the tasks you’ve currently got on the go. That kind of compulsion loop is going to be difficult for some players.
While I’ve thus far had a healthy relationship with Pokopia, I recognise that it’s the kind of game that if playing games all day wasn’t my job could easily interfere with my ability to properly maintain my daily schedule. I have the luxury of being able to play this game a little obsessively, and I’m as a result enjoying it more than most other similar cosy city builders, but I know that my ability to get hooked by that compulsive loop isn’t a luxury available to everyone. Other players with similar disabilities to me would likely find this pushing up against real life a bit more.
Pokopia doesn’t have natural offramps designed into its gameplay loop – That makes it deeply compelling to play for long stretches of time, but can make for an unhealthy gaming experience for those of us who are prone to addictive loops of this nature.
As someone who absolutely LOVED Dragon Quest Builders 1 and 2, Pokopia is basically everything I wanted from an eventual third entry in that series. Taking the Dragon Quest Builders series core building and construction loop and layering it with Pokémon’s cute creatures and collectathon nature has created a game incredibly well tuned to my interests. It has a lot of accessibility positives, but I do think its core gameplay structure isn’t going to be the right fit for everyone. If you’re confident that you’ll be able to put it down when needed, even if you’ve got uncompleted tasks and there’s other things you could wrap up first, there is an amazingly fun game to be found here.
If trying to finish everything that’s on your plate before you put a game down is a place where you sometimes have problems, and something that might get in the way of you doing daily tasks, I would consider whether this game is right for you.