Pokémon Is Giving The Post-Apocalypse A Surprising Makeover

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.

While you’re busy adopting Pokémon and prepping their new home, you can explore the Kanto region and find recognizable relics from previous games now fallen into dereliction — abandoned Pokémon Centers, landmarks from Red and Blue, and even the S.S. Anne can be spotted amid a slow decay. The game is filled with signifiers of some depressing cataclysm facing humanity in the future, and even though the answer isn’t zombies or nuclear apocalypse or any of the other dour existential threats that crop up in speculative sci-fi, it’s no less tragic.

Through notes found in the game, it’s revealed that humanity abandoned Earth to take refuge among the stars following an undisclosed climate catastrophe. This means that humanity simply left their Pokémon companions behind, although they attempted to store them in a massive computer system known as the Pokémon Conservation Project, which failed. The result is a severing of the connection between humans and their lifelong friends, and although it clearly wasn’t intentional or desired, Pokémon have been left to repopulate Earth however they see fit.

Since Pokopia takes place in a faraway future, this cataclysm likely won’t affect the mainline games, but it’s interesting and a little bittersweet to think of a future in which Pokémon can freely roam and explore the world at the cost of their connection to humanity. There’s also the question of how important this possible future will be to the series: will it hang over upcoming installments, or could it even transcend the games and become the basis for another film? Outside of being an entertaining game, it’s refreshing to see that even a spin-off can still provide a bold and interesting direction for a franchise that has been around for three decades now.