New Pokémon Snap review: a charming return to an unusual concept
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Trekking through forests and meadows in search of unusual creatures to photograph is a peaceful but monotonous experience.
Pokémon is nominally about collecting and battling cute monsters, but these games, like most children's fiction that has stood the test of time, draw you into an interesting and believable world where kids can live out their fantasies and humans coexist with odd creatures. It's a universe that has captivated a few generations, and adults who grew up with it have a strong attachment to it.
Credit to nintendo.com
Pokémon has always provided a world, even on a tiny, black-and-white Game Boy screen.
The new Pokémon Snap lets you see the world through a camera lens as you glide serenely through various fictional habitats in a cheerful yellow observation pod.
The Pokémon go about their business – a Machamp poses on the beach, a Sawsbuck struts around a forest, a Combee doodles in a flower meadow – and you frame the perfect shot. To capture fast-moving airborne creatures, you must be quick with the shutter and patient to capture a dawdling Charmander in the perfect pose.
It isn't completely passive. A well-aimed apple lobbed at a sleeping creature may cause it to fall out of a tree for an action shot, while music may attract a critter hiding in tall grass, and scanning the environment may reveal a secret path.
Day and night trips bring out different wildlife – there are about 900 Pokémon now, a vast and bizarre menagerie for Snap's creators to choose from, and they've featured 200 of them here, from all eras of the game's 25-year history.
It's like a slow-paced puzzle game, with each journey leading to a new discovery.
In theory, each journey offers the chance for a new discovery or a perfect shot.
Actually, the monotony of this chilled ecological surveillance began to grate on me; for a photography game, it could certainly be more exciting. Long conversations with Pokémon professors
Credit to nintendo.com
and photographers back at the lab, mandatory excursions, and a story that feels superfluous all serve as roadblocks to new expeditions and photo subjects in the game.
Your photos are methodically rated at the end of each trip, but unlike the notoriously withholding praise of the N64 version's Professor Oak, I found this new prof to be so generous with his assessments that capturing a gold-star shot didn't feel particularly exciting.
Credit to nintendo.com
Day and night trips bring out different wildlife – there are about 900 Pokémon now, a vast and bizarre menagerie for Snap's creators to choose from, and they've featured 200 of them here, from all eras of the game's 25-year history.
The coasts, forests, and volcanoes are sometimes spectacular and always teeming with life, but after a few hours, you trundle through them over and over, and while they remix themselves slightly, there are only so many times you can get excited about photographing an anime caterpillar.
After a couple of trips around a new location, photographing everything that flies overhead, emerges from the undergrowth, or dances its way across a tree branch, you're left taking marginally better pictures of the same things and waiting for something new to happen.
It's still enjoyable because the Pokémon themselves are so interesting to look at; it's just not as exciting as it could be. It's a laid-back game that provides many hours of gentle photographic research to anyone drawn to Pokémon's strange world – whether you're a veteran of Pokémania in the 1990s or a nine-year-old who has just discovered its allure.
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