Pokémon's Daily Puzzle Game Is More Like 'Neopets' Than 'Wordle'

From the New York Times to Apple, daily puzzles have taken over our smartphones. But when I was younger, I spent my portable gaming time chasing down a different craze: Pokémon. Now, the cuddly pocket monsters are trying to find their place in the trend kicked off by Wordle with Pokémon Friends, a new game that was shadowdropped on mobile and Nintendo Switch today just before its official announcement a few minutes later.

The catch? Like NYT Games, it’s not exactly free, at least on Nintendo Switch. On mobile, you can do some light play without paying, but you’ll pretty quickly be encouraged to shell out for a more complete experience. 

The gameplay may also not exactly be what you expect. While Wordle’s shareability helped lead to its success, Pokémon Friends’ daily brain teasers are not the same for everyone. (I checked across two different accounts, on two separate devices, and while I got the same puzzle types, my exact brain teasers for the day were different.) That kind of goes against the daily puzzle idea for me, but to be fair, these puzzles aren’t exactly the kind that would benefit from a communal mystery.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

While Wordle encourages players to gossip or complain about what the word of the day might be, Friends’ puzzles have more of a browser-game quality to them. You’ll find sliding tile puzzles, ice skating puzzles, and Pipe Dream-esque railroad building puzzles. They’re cute, but at least based on my experience, they're not something that will stump an adult for long, and definitely not to the point where you’d feel the need to talk about them online. While I get that this probably makes them more approachable to a younger audience, I do think there was a potential for something more collaborative and mysterious that would better fit the “daily challenge” idea, especially if you take the anime’s Who’s That Pokémon? segments into account.

Instead, that mini-game quality to the puzzles here has me thinking less about Wordle and more about old-school flash games like Neopets. That comparison also ties into the game’s other feature, which is collecting plushies. 

Pokémon is all about “catching ‘em all,” and Pokémon Friends is no different. But here, rather than catching live critters, you’ll be hoarding Pokémon plushies. Each time you finish a puzzle, you’ll earn some yarn, which you can then convert into a digital stuffed animal of a corresponding pocket monster and display into a digital room. It’s a pretty robust system, since you’ll be able to place your fluffy collectibles in full 3D space, and get furniture to show off alongside them. Again, sort of like how you might decorate your Neohome back in the day.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

While this approach isn’t what I expected, there is something to Pokémon Friends when taken less as a Wordle competitor and more as an old-school collection of tiny, browser-game style brain teasers you can relax to. The game has more than 1,200 puzzles baked in by default, and even if they aren’t updated fresh daily like on other puzzle apps, it’ll take a while for you to cycle through them all.

That is, at least if you stick to playing the one set of about three puzzles that free users get per day. If you’re willing to shell out, you can also pay for a $10 “Basic Pack” to unlock unlimited puzzles per day (or just buy the Switch version, which costs $10 but has unlimited puzzles unlocked by default). The Basic Pack also adds extra puzzle types, and if that’s not enough, there’s also “Puzzle On” bundles for further expansion. 

With all the DLC added, which lets you blast through the premade puzzles as you wish, Pokémon Friends feels more like a game that might have been released on cartridge during the DS’ life cycle, or something that might have been a companion website for a real-life plushie during the toys-to-life craze. That’s maybe disappointing to folks who wanted a more communal, continually updated experience like Wordle, but it’ll probably hit gamers with a certain type of nostalgia right in the feels.