During July’sPokémonPresents, the company surprised everyone by shadow dropping a brand-new spin-off mobile game,Pokémon Friends.The cute spinoff game gives players threePokémon-themed puzzles to complete every day, with increasing difficulty. The end goal is to unravel yarn, which you can then put into a special Poké Ball machine that churns out Pokémon plushies a la Build-A-Bear.
I’ve been playing the game every daysince it came out on July 22, and, so far, the game has been everything I expected it to be: cute and simple. But the mobile title also does something I wasn’t expecting at all. A handful of the puzzle typesrequire me to use a feature of my phone that I didn’t even realize it had.
Pokémon Friends Game Mode Turns Your Phone Into A Nostalgic Toy
The first time I was presented with the “Don’t Slip Up, Piplup” puzzle, I was momentarily baffled. Like the rest of the puzzles, the premise behind this one was simple: all I had to do wasguide Piplup across the slippery ice to the goal.As a veteran RPG player, I was all too familiar with this type of puzzle, which even appears in some of thePokémongames.
“Pokémon Friends had managed to use my phone’s advanced gyroscope technology to turn the modern marvel of technology into a nostalgic children’s toy.”
Confident in my skills, I glossed over the instructions screen, only to realize that there were no controls for me to use. Instead, the Piplup puzzle required me tomove my phone around to move the Pokémonlike one of those old marble-maze toys. This comparison is even more spot-on once I came across the “Spheal Spinner” puzzle, in which Spheal even looks like one of those marbles.
In essence,Pokémon Friendshad managed to use my phone’s advanced gyroscope technology to turn the modern marvel of technology intoa nostalgic children’s toy.
Pokémon Continues To Imbue Modern Products With Nostalgia
The Pokémon Company Knows That Nostalgia Sells
While Pokémon has been criticized fornot innovating and expanding its ideasenough, there’s no question that it does nostalgia right. The company has been making the most of its nearly 30 years of experience to tug on long-time fans' heartstrings withproducts that remind them of their childhood.
To some fans, this might signal that the company is stuck in the past, but in reality,the nostalgia scheme works. Products featuring the original gen-1 Pokémon sell so well that it can cause trouble, as the community saw with the Eevee-centricPrismatic EvolutionsPokémon TCGset, whichexperienced extreme shortagesdue to its popularity.
As Pokémon continues to look forward, it also looks back. Though anew generation is on the way,Pokémon Legends,Champions,andTCG Pocketall look back at the company’s franchise staples (existing generations,Stadium,and theTCG, respectively).
In the case ofPokémon Friends,the use of my phone in such an old-school way was adelightful discovery. For a moment, I forgot all about how powerful my handheld device is, and it turned into a simple game I used to play as a kid when I didn’t have the world’s entire knowledge base at my fingertips.
