In My System | What’cha Ben Playing 3/19/2026

When Nin­ten­do first revealed Pokopia, I was ready to dis­miss the game out­right. Why would I be inter­est­ed in a game that is basi­cal­ly just Ani­mal Cross­ing, but with Poké­mon? After see­ing the amaz­ing­ly pos­i­tive recep­tion for the game, it peaked my curios­i­ty. After look­ing into it a bit more, I real­ized that Pokopia is way more than just a reskinned Ani­mal Cross­ing game and have been floored by how time melts away when I play it.

Cozy town-builder games are usu­al­ly not my favorites, but Pokopia scratch­es an itch I did­n’t even know that I had. There is just so much avail­able to do in Pokopia. Do you want to go around and spew water on every­thing to bring grass and plants back to life? Do you want to build new habi­tats to draw in new Poké­mon to be your friends? Do you want to rebuild the Poké­mon cen­ter? You can kind of just bounce around to any or none of these tasks. The water­ing mechan­ics are sat­is­fy­ing in a sim­i­lar man­ner to the Pow­er­wash Sim­u­la­tor games, tak­ing an ugly envi­ron­ment and slow­ly mak­ing it look beau­ti­ful again.

The Poké­mon nos­tal­gia also adds just enough as well to keep me engaged, as most of the char­ac­ters so far are the big­ger hit­ters from ear­li­er in the series. No Eevee just yet, but I am sure it is on its way soon enough. I feel like I have bare­ly start­ed, but I am look­ing for­ward to get to the sec­ond area and see what else the game has to offer. I have been pleas­ant­ly sur­prised so far with every­thing Pokopia has to offer, though I think my top spot of the year still belongs to Res­i­dent Evil Requiem so far.