Help, I can’t stop playing Pokémon Pokopia! And it’s all thanks to one very clever difference from Animal Crossing

I admit I was a bit surprised when I looked at my Pokémon Pokopia playtime on Monday and discovered I’d somehow put in nearly 24 hours over the weekend. But still, that didn’t stop me from scoffing when my colleagues started talking about how they’d been losing sleep to the thing. Ridiculous, I thought! Impossible! So it almost feels inevitable that, a day later, this article comes to you through a thick fog of sleep deprivation – and all because I stayed up till 2am last night, unshakably compelled to fix every damned bridge in Bleak Beach. Pokopia has me good.

I was already fully onboard with Pokopia – and it’s wonderfully weird post-apocalypse – after my first couple of hours, but it’s only continued to tighten its grip since then. It helps, of course, that it’s full of personality, and that its lively Pokémon cast are just a delight to be around. Sure, I know they’re really all just snippets of the same randomised dialogue being spewed out over and over again deep down, but I still love watching them have their spirited conversations from afar; I love the way they’ll casually interact with the world – messing with a sandpit I gave them, or hopping onto a deckchair for a snooze – and I adore their other little tics, yo.

But more than that, Omega Force (the team behind the excellent Dragon Quest Builders series, if you didn’t already know) has put them in a wonderfully engaging, constantly surprising, campaign. Each discrete area of Pokopia has its own Pokémon, its own resources, its own vibes, and, crucially, its own problems to solve. Over in Rocky Ridges, I’m currently trying to organise a party, while in Bleak Beach – an area I’ve grown particularly attached to – the unshiftable cloud cover has been the primary concern. These are the big campaign beats, but within those, there’re a bunch of smaller threads pulling me in other directions (party planning at one point involved transforming into Graveler to break off his gym bro relationship with Machop, for some reason), each one seeming to culminate in a cool new discovery or a useful new tool.

Unlike the genre-adjacent Animal Crossing, which essentially maintains interest through perpetual withholding, Pokopia – even with its various built-in wait times – feels genuinely, immediately, and constantly rewarding. And when you start chucking in the more evergreen activities like crafting and customization, building and decorating, which feed into their own engaging loops of exploration and acquisition, the capacity for time dilation becomes strong. I’ve already spent ages experimenting with waterways to min-max my irrigation, and now I’ve unlocked electricity, I’ve started thinking about Pokopia’s world (soon to be an absolute mess of power lines and windmills) in completely new ways. Omega Team’s great at meting out this stuff so it feels like every time I hop back in, there’s something new to do.

Honestly, though, as great as all this is, it’s not what’s been hoovering up most of my time. Instead, it turns out the very specific itch Pokopia is scratching is exactly the same one that’s had me hosing away hundreds of hours in Power Wash Simulator: the insatiable urge to fix and clean and restore. The world of Pokopia is one of time-ravaged dereliction, where the familiar pristine sheen of mainline Pokémon games has, in the absence of humans, been left to collapse and decay. Ash piles high atop untold secrets in Rocky Ridges; cobbled roads are cracked and masonry crumbled; in Bleak Beach, wooden walkways have collapsed, harbours have been eroded by countless tides, and bridges lie in ruin – and I’m powerless to resist their pull!

My compulsion to find form in the world’s fragmentary remains feels almost archeological. And I love the way Omega Force has left just enough clues across Pokopia’s ruined landscape that you can intuit how it was pre-calamity then apply that knowledge elsewhere. Study the land and you can divine a pattern in the way the few remaining street lamps are placed, or determine exactly how far handrails were meant to go. Even glimpsing beneath the water reveals secrets of the past: sunken cobbles offering hints as to where roads and walkways above once hewed. And so, for me, the thrill of Pokopia isn’t just the building, it’s that it’s a restoration project – returning the broken world back to its former splendour, one brick at a time.

It’s time-consuming work, I’ll tell you, requiring a keen eye and a degree of imagination to fill in the blanks and piece things back together – just like I imagine a proper archeologist might do. And it’s enormously rewarding too! From the ruin that greeted me, I’m slowly creating a new Pokéfuture from a long lost Poképast, and having a wonderful time as I go. I get why there might be cynicism around Pokopia given the state of recent Pokémon games, but Omega Force has made something genuinely great, often in wholly unexpected ways. And I’m perfectly okay with it stealing all of my free time, even if that might just be the sleep deprivation talking.