Nintendo

Since you asked for a follow-up, I've played a bit of Pokopia.

It's cute, and it's a lot more Minecrafty than I expected. You build little habitats for Pokemon like a few bunches of tall grass or tall grass under a tree or whatever, and things will move in to live there. Everyone has a basic personality, and it's all super friendly. There's no pressure, you can half-ass everything without consequence, but you advance by making your community happy by providing them with what they ask for. I've done the first 2 maps so far (they're all based on towns from the Kanto region). The last thing I did was get to a map that basically has no real story and lets you build however you want, and the game said I can move my Pokemon from other maps there so I'm going to build a little community for my favourites.

As for negatives, building is quite tedious, you can place blocks in 3D space around you based on where the camera is looking so you kind of have to swing it around madly to get things where you want them, and building in a cramped area is rough. Destroying blocks takes a few punches but you punch in a little AoE attack, so you have to line things up very precisely with the same annoying system when you only want to hit a specific block. You can make pre-made building kits that require the help of a bunch of mons with different skills. This is great, but anything past the most basic couple of huts takes ages and it's in real time (as in "Come back tomorrow and we should have this done"). Thankfully you can just change the console settings to time travel without consequence, because fuck that.

Anyway, it's a nice cosy, low-pressure game with a surprisingly grim story. You wake up in the post-apocalypse and everyone's gone, so you have to try to make the areas nicer to attract more Pokemon back, while rebuilding towns in the hope that humans will come back too. As you explore you find pre-whatever logs, & some post-whatever journal entries that seem to be suggesting the world became uninhabitable due to climate change so everyone "went away." A lot of the friends you make are so sad that their trainer is gone and can't wait to find them again, and I don't know how this is going to end but well... I think you should get comfortable without them, guys.

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Other than that last week I mentioned Digimon Story Time Stranger, I played the demo but didn't really like it. Then there was Monster Hunter World, which I mentioned was one my favourite games but my gf isn't really enjoying it so my dreams of playing that together with her have been crushed. On the bright side the demo of Monster Hunter Stories 3 is fantastic, I never finished the 2nd game because while I liked the game I started to really hate the teammates' AI and couldn't force myself through it, but the upcoming game fixes a lot of issues and it so fun to play. I just dropped $330AUD on Pokopia this week (one for me, my for my gf and one for my sister's birthday present), so I'm not sure about dropping another $108 on this, but it's extremely tempting.