Pokémon Sleep looks adorable and sounds kind of intrusive in new video

By wazup on July 6, 2023 Comments Closed / 66 views

A new Pokémon Sleep tutorial video introduces the game’s unique take on pokédexes and filling them with monster research.

By Charles Pulliam-Moore, a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

See our ethics statement.

After months of leaving us in suspense with little idea about how Pokémon Sleep would work, exactly, The Pokémon Company’s released a charming introduction video explaining more about the game and its creative, rest-focused take on filling out the pokédex.

Rather than sending you out into the world to search for monsters for your personal collection, Pokémon Sleep switches up the formula of the classic games by pairing players with a different Snorlax every week in order to conduct research with Professor Neroli, a new character who specializes in pokémon sleep research.

The new video explains how, after raising their Snorlaxes throughout the day by feeding them various kinds of berries, Pokémon Sleep players can then help their partners grow more powerful by getting a good night’s sleep, which determines a “sleep score” that’s calculated in Drowsy Power. The higher your Snorlax’s Drowsy Power, the more new and different pokémon will appear when you check in with Pokémon Sleep. Every species of pokémon can have one of three Sleep Styles: Dozing, Snoozing, and Slumbering, and your most recent style of sleep determines which of the three types will appear when you wake up.

For the most part, the new video makes Pokémon Sleep seem like a very cute — if a bit involved — way of encouraging people to be more mindful about how much rest they’re getting and easing them into the habit of getting more. At the same time, though, between the video’s instructions about how you have to bring your phone to bed in order to play Pokémon Sleep and its casual mention of how the app will record audio of you sleeping in order to determine the quality of your rest, it’s also a reminder of how much personal data the game’s harvesting, which may understandably make it a nonstarter for some.

There’s probably quite a bit more to Pokémon Sleep than what’s detailed here, and while we still don’t have a concrete release date, Android users can preregister for the app now.