Reviewed on: Switch 2
Platform:
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Koei Tecmo, Game Freak
Release: March 5, 2026

Since its inception, the Pokémon franchise has been about checking boxes; after all, the famous tagline is “Gotta Catch ‘em All!” Pokémon Pokopia evolves the checklist concept beyond collecting gym badges and catching Pokémon, stripping conflict of any kind from the experience and instead giving you nearly endless tasks to improve your various towns and the overall happiness of the Pokémon therein. And it does so with a loop that mixes elements from Dragon Quest Builders, Animal Crossing, and Minecraft, resulting in one of the best laid-back simulation titles I’ve played in years. Though it maintains an emphasis on collection, it shifts the focus from battling to revitalizing a post-apocalyptic region and reforging our connections not only to the world, but also each other. And just like when the mainline Pokémon series is at its best, I had a difficult time putting it down.

In Pokopia, you control a Ditto, who wakes up with no trace of their trainer, so they turn into a customizable facsimile of a human. As they venture into the surrounding world, they discover humanity has abandoned the Pokémon world. The area feels lonely, barren, and desolate, but one Pokémon, a Tangrowth, is there to hold your hand as you reenter the world of the living. This creature, who adopts the name Professor Tangrowth, serves as the primary driver of the main narrative, handing out tasks that will reinvigorate the area, with the express purpose of not only attracting more Pokémon, but hopefully also the missing humans.

After just a couple of hours, the first biome is no longer brown and empty, but green and bustling with recognizable Pokémon. It’s a supremely rewarding gameplay experience, revitalizing an area and watching various species congregate and collaborate to improve their living situation, which is important since it persists through to the end of the narrative.

In each environment, you also have important requests, which involve working with your Pokémon friends to accomplish area-specific tasks, like summoning a rainstorm or throwing a party. These are the culmination of each environment and serve as the main way to push the overarching story forward, but the tasks often require specific Pokémon and resources, putting you on rails more than I prefer with cozy games such as this.

The story is littered with enthralling mysteries I couldn’t wait to further unravel. What happened to humanity that caused it to flee? Why did this world fall into a state of disrepair? And who are these strange Pokémon who look like special variants of existing creatures? As a Pokémon fan dating back to 1998, pulling these threads, which include fun nods to the series’ past, served as a highlight of my time with Pokopia.

As part of the revitalization effort, you need to rebuild each town’s Pokémon Center, which involves using resources and recruiting the area’s Pokémon to fill roles like bulldozing, building, and others. Since each Pokémon has specialties, you need to fill those roles with your befriended Pokémon and gather resources before you can build anything, which pushes you to fully explore the area. This means a lot of running back and forth to complete tasks, but thankfully, you can build rail networks to make traversal easier. Unfortunately, I was often so thorough with my curious exploration that, before I triggered the narrative events, I had often already completed the requests, leading to awkward, extended conversations where a Pokémon asks me to do something I already finished hours ago.

Each structure you build – along with other tasks you complete – raises the environment level of the biome, progressing the story and unlocking new items in the shop. This makes each construction project feel more monumental, but since some buildings (like Pokémon Centers) aren’t ready until the next day, I was always frustrated that it throttled my progress. It kicked off several races against the clock, making sure I started “ready next day” construction projects before midnight, so I didn’t have to wait 24 hours for them to be ready. I understand the reasoning for having construction projects take time, and there’s rarely a shortage of tasks to complete while I wait, but it’s frustrating when I just wanted to progress the main story. For an otherwise laid-back game, this element adds layers of stress.

Your first biome may be dried and dead, but a mid-game environment gives you a flooded and polluted beachfront to reckon with. Though many of the tasks are similar – recruit Pokémon by recreating habitats they like and then craft, build, and organize your way to getting the area back to life – each sprawling, multi-layered environment presents new challenges and exploration opportunities. I cannot tell you how many times I went exploring for a very specific purpose, only to get sidetracked by myriad offshoots and extra tasks that presented themselves.

Though I was sometimes underwhelmed by how Pokémon Pokopia rewards you (or, in some cases, doesn’t) for deviating from the beaten path, exploration was often a reward in and of itself, as I would find a new path through the environment or a vista that let me chart areas I hadn’t yet visited. My favorite incentive for exploration, however, is lore drops, which provide hints about what happened to this ruined world to drive humans away and Pokémon into hiding.

 

When Pokémon join your town, some offer their assistance by following you and using their powers, such as Magmar lighting fires or Piplup spraying bubbles to clean dirt. I loved building a small army of followers and running around the environment, completing tasks and cleaning up together. However, the most impactful Pokémon grant you new abilities for Ditto’s Transform, which allows them to copy another Pokémon’s moves. Even 30 hours deep, I was still earning new abilities that vastly improved my expeditions and opened new parts of areas I previously thought thoroughly investigated.

While the main campaign is extraordinarily guided – at times to a fault – Pokopia offers a bonus biome that allows for free-form exploration, construction, and Pokémon-attracting. The main story leans heavily into developer Omega Force’s history with Dragon Quest Builders, but this extra area is more in line with Animal Crossing; you have basic goals, but none of the overarching narrative or hand-holdy progression found in the main game. And since this space is so massive, you can sink dozens of hours into this area alone. The narrative-driven elements are positioned as the main attraction, but this free-form area is an excellent way to decompress from the constant checklist chasing. Long after rolling credits on the main story, I will return to my sprawling island to continue shaping my little Pokémon paradise.

Pokémon Pokopia is a game of wonder, exploration, and revitalization, delivering a cozy, satisfying experience with no threat of danger. Despite my minor complaints, Pokopia sticks out as one of the best examples of a third-party developer using the Pokémon license to the fullest extent possible. As a kid, I always wished I could spend time in the Pokémon world, and now, 30 years later, I feel like I have.

Score: 9

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This article was originally published on December 4, 2017

The Resident Evil franchise has a storied and well-documented history, but here’s something that you might not know: development on Capcom’s campy horror game originally began on the Super NES.

While visiting Capcom for our recent cover story on Mega Man 11, we chatted with director Koji Oda, who was originally hired to work at Capcom in 1991 on games like Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts and The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse.

“Honestly, I feel like I joined the game industry at the best time,” says Oda. “Typically, games would take half a year and no longer than a year to develop, so I feel like I was able to take part in a lot of different projects. It’s not that well known, but before Resident Evil went to the PlayStation, I was working on it for the Super NES.”

Resident Evil originally began development as a spiritual sequel to the NES horror game Sweet Home, which many consider to be the original survival horror game. However, when Sony’s PlayStation released in late 1994, it became a quick success, and Capcom’s management deiced to take advantage of the new console’s power.

“This was back before the name Resident Evil had even been assigned to it,” says Oda. “The codename for this was literally just ‘horror game.’ On the SNES, we were working with limited hard drive space, so it’s not like we could dump a movie in there. If we had actually completed it on the SNES, I’m sure it would have been considerably different. For example, it was originally set in a place that had nothing to do with reality – more of a hellish place.”

For more on the history of Resident Evil, read our retrospective on the development of Sweet Home.

It was a busy week here at Game Informer, which I admit is a sentence I could write to introduce this article every Friday. We revealed a new cover with Invincible VS, reviewed Resident Evil Requiem and God of War Sons of Sparta, and Pokémon announced its next generation.

Which all leads us to this. It's time for the weekend and our usual recommendation of games and things you should check out! But before that, here's a recap of the biggest stories of the week:

• Cover Reveal – Invincible VS
• Interview: World of Warcraft Lead Composer On Making Of Midnight’s Human-Made Music
• Resident Evil Requiem Review - A Sublime Sepulchre
• Everything Announced At The February 2026 Pokémon Presents
• Game Boy-Shaped Pokémon Soundtrack Player Announced
• You Can Marry Clint And Sandy In The 1.7 Update For Stardew Valley, ConcernedApe Announces
• Check Out These Steam Next Fest Demos Picked By The Game Informer Staff

PlayStation shut down Bluepoint Games, the developer behind the Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Colossus remakes, earlier this month. Amongst general sadness at the news amongst players, there was also a feeling that the studio would have been the one to (finally) do something with Bloodborne, ideally a remake, considering Bluepoint's pedigree. 

Now, according to a new Bloomberg report, it turns out Bluepoint did pitch a Bloodborne remake in early 2025, but it was rejected by PlayStation due to FromSoftware's desires. 

Bloomberg says its sources told it that Bluepoint "was told that the numbers made sense [to remake Bloodborne] but FromSoftware didn't want it to happen." As the report notes, former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida theorized during a Kinda Funny interview last year that FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki, who directed Bloodborne, was interested in remaking the 2015 action game himself but was too busy to do so; Yoshida said he "doesn't want anyone else to touch it" and that if that's true, he believes PlayStation would respect Miyazaki's wishes, even though PlayStation owns the Bloodborne IP. 

As previously reported, Bluepoint was working on a live-service spinoff of Santa Monica Studios' God of War series (which recently got the side-scroller treatment in God of War Sons of Sparta). Bloomberg reports that Bluepoint's spinoff was a game in which Kratos' son, Atreus, one of the main protagonists of God of War Ragnarök, fell into Hades (hell). "A loose idea was for players to control different versions or aspects of Atreus as they battled through Greek hell, and to have some sort of cooperative gameplay and ongoing support," the report reads. However, PlayStation canceled this project in January of 2025. Tasked with figuring out its next project, something PlayStation helped with, Bluepoint eventually pitched the aforementioned (rejected) Bloodborne remake. 

After that rejection, Bluepoint reportedly pitched an updated version of Shadow of the Colossus, which the studio already remade for PlayStation 4 in 2018, and it was also turned down. Other pitched projects include a Ghost of Tsushima spinoff, among other games set within pre-existing PlayStation franchises, according to Bloomberg, which also reports that employees at the studio began to fear for the company's existence when the God of War trilogy remake was announced earlier this month, on February 12, without their involvement.  

A week later, on February 19, PlayStation shut down Bluepoint, just five years after it acquired the beloved studio in 2021. 

[Source: Bloomberg]

What are your thoughts on PlayStation's closure of Bluepoint Games? Let us know in the comments below!

In our latest and sanest episode of The Game Informer Show, it's time for the crew to dodge zombies, mix herbs, and slot gemstones into strange doors. It's Resident Evil Requiem week, and everyone's been playing it in some fashion, so Marcus, Wes, Charles, and Eric spend the first half of the show talking through all of it.

After the break, we get into our favorite Steam Next Fest demos, from Star Fox-alikes and Disco Elysium-alikes to a game where an egg is mightier than the gourd. And we close things out with Marcus teaching us all a little bit about wrestling, WWE 2K26, and why you should always get your athletic performer contracts in writing.

The Game Informer Show is a weekly podcast covering the video game industry. Join us every Friday for chats about video game reviews, news, and exclusive reveals alongside Game Informer staff and special guests from around the industry.

Watch the video podcast:

Listen to "Resident Evil Requiem + Our Favorite Steam Next Fest Demos" on Spreaker.

Follow our hosts on social media:

• Marcus Stewart (@marcusstewart7)
• Wesley LeBlanc (@wesleyleblanc)
• Charles Harte (@chuckduck365)
• Eric Van Allen (@seamoosi)

Jump ahead using these timestamps:

• 00:00 - Intro
• 04:05 - Resident Evil Requiem
• 51:38 - Steam Next Fest Demos
• 1:31:29 - WWE 2K26 Preview