I've been playing this for about a week, a Pokemon clone by a tiny Brighton-based developer called Bytten Studio which released last year to quite some fanfare. It's really charming and quite ingenious, subtly innovating on the Pokemon formula in pleasing ways.
Plot set-up is different to your usual Pokemon, and the tone is generally darker and more melancholy - with characters often being downright miserable/depressed or outright broken. No-one wants to be where they find themselves in the 'New Wirral' setting of the game, which - without going into spoilers - basically involves people waking up there mysteriously through some kind of interdimensional time-warping shenanigans. But the game frequently reminds the player not to think too hard about any of this, including the way monster 'capture' works.
That's right, this place also happens to be full of monsters! To battle the monsters people don't catch and train up other monsters in the standard 'Mon way. No indeed! Instead they record the monsters' sound/essence onto magical personal cassette players which - when played back - turns them into the monsters. This adds a nice gameplay wrinkle in that you can play different cassettes to switch monsters while it is the underlying player who accrues - and carries forward - the status effects, buffs/debuffs, etc. Another welcome layer of flexibility on the 'Mon formula is that TMs are replaced by stickers which give moves/abilities, and you can peel and re-stick these to your cassettes (monsters) almost at will.
The game has standard Ranger (i.e. Trainer) battles which reward you with badges as well as the larger plot against the mysterious Archangels, which are distinguished from the rest of the game with weirdly polygonal and deliberately glitchy graphics. There are teams of zombies/vampires which need vanquishing as well which, in a slightly on-the-nose attempt at British humour,
The monsters themselves are wonderful and strange, their types interacting in quirky ways that the game is kind of enough to remind you about as you are battling (e.g. Earth beats Plastic due to 'landfill' advantage). There are about 130 of them but if you level up your relationships with various characters they can be combined in powerful 'fusions' that apparently yield more than 14,000 unique combinations. I've seen about five.
The game is quite attractive to look at: the monster and character sprite-work is excellent. This is combined with polygon-based environments and hand-drawn cartoony characters for cutscenes/conversations. Each looks really good in themselves, especially the sprites and cartoons, but personally I find it slightly incongruous to have the three graphic types combined together. That said, I think mainline Pokemon games do exactly the same.
Anyway, after the sloppiness of the most recent, dialled-in official Pokemon game on Switch, I'm really enjoying this. It's pacy, attractive, fun, innovative, and it also has a superb soundtrack with vocal tracks - which again gives it a different feel for this kind of game.
Playing it on Switch. Performance was an issue on release, apparently, but it's patched up good now and runs well (only occasional stutter/pop-in when running fast from between heavily populated zones). An easy recommend to any Pokemon fans.
Plot set-up is different to your usual Pokemon, and the tone is generally darker and more melancholy - with characters often being downright miserable/depressed or outright broken. No-one wants to be where they find themselves in the 'New Wirral' setting of the game, which - without going into spoilers - basically involves people waking up there mysteriously through some kind of interdimensional time-warping shenanigans. But the game frequently reminds the player not to think too hard about any of this, including the way monster 'capture' works.
That's right, this place also happens to be full of monsters! To battle the monsters people don't catch and train up other monsters in the standard 'Mon way. No indeed! Instead they record the monsters' sound/essence onto magical personal cassette players which - when played back - turns them into the monsters. This adds a nice gameplay wrinkle in that you can play different cassettes to switch monsters while it is the underlying player who accrues - and carries forward - the status effects, buffs/debuffs, etc. Another welcome layer of flexibility on the 'Mon formula is that TMs are replaced by stickers which give moves/abilities, and you can peel and re-stick these to your cassettes (monsters) almost at will.
The game has standard Ranger (i.e. Trainer) battles which reward you with badges as well as the larger plot against the mysterious Archangels, which are distinguished from the rest of the game with weirdly polygonal and deliberately glitchy graphics. There are teams of zombies/vampires which need vanquishing as well which, in a slightly on-the-nose attempt at British humour,
The monsters themselves are wonderful and strange, their types interacting in quirky ways that the game is kind of enough to remind you about as you are battling (e.g. Earth beats Plastic due to 'landfill' advantage). There are about 130 of them but if you level up your relationships with various characters they can be combined in powerful 'fusions' that apparently yield more than 14,000 unique combinations. I've seen about five.
The game is quite attractive to look at: the monster and character sprite-work is excellent. This is combined with polygon-based environments and hand-drawn cartoony characters for cutscenes/conversations. Each looks really good in themselves, especially the sprites and cartoons, but personally I find it slightly incongruous to have the three graphic types combined together. That said, I think mainline Pokemon games do exactly the same.
Anyway, after the sloppiness of the most recent, dialled-in official Pokemon game on Switch, I'm really enjoying this. It's pacy, attractive, fun, innovative, and it also has a superb soundtrack with vocal tracks - which again gives it a different feel for this kind of game.
Playing it on Switch. Performance was an issue on release, apparently, but it's patched up good now and runs well (only occasional stutter/pop-in when running fast from between heavily populated zones). An easy recommend to any Pokemon fans.
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