NIGHTY NIGHT

‘Pokémon Sleep’ Wants to Change the Way You Go to Bed

A new “game” that you play while you’re sleeping makes manifest Pokémon lovers’ dreams.

First, Pokémon reinvented going outside (by encouraging you to just do it virtually). Then, Pokémon reinvented walking (by encouraging you to use your phone while doing it). And now, 27 years in, Pokémon is reinventing sleep.

It may sound either strange, hyperbolic, or both to say it, but it is true: Pokémon Sleep is the most exciting video game of the year. “Video game” should be used lightly, however; Sleep is a gamified sleep tracking aid, combining the franchise’s cutest creatures with metrics to chart a necessary biological function. You already sleep with your smartphone next to your head, most likely. Now, Pokémon is the latest company to mine your biometric data while you do it.

As the Pokémon Company revealed earlier this week in an intently watched livestream in honor of the franchise’s birthday, Sleep makes manifest Pokémon lovers’ dreams. Your length and quality of sleep earn you points as well as opportunities to see more Pokémon. Depending on how well you sleep, you will wake up to find more Pokémon hanging out on the island that serves as Pokémon Sleep’s central interface. If your phone ascertains that you sleep “goofy-style”—on your stomach with your legs spread in opposite directions—you may see a Slowpoke the following morning, lying in a similar position. If you sleep scrunched up in a tiny ball in the fetal position, like me, an Eevee may greet you in the morning.

The more different ways that you sleep, the more Pokémon that you get to see. So… time to experiment with how you do something unconsciously? Considering that the game is compatible with the optional-but-also-not peripheral the Pokémon Go Plus-Plus, which lies flat on your bed and features audio of a Pikachu cutely singing you to sleep, experiment you will. When Pokémon Sleep launches on the app stores later this year, you will finally learn how to stop rolling around, kicking your partner every night.

As adorable and silly as this all sounds, Pokémon Sleep is still, after all, a sleep-tracking app. But Pokémon fans treated its full-fledged reveal as proof that there is a higher power. Finally, this ridiculous-sounding project has come to fruition—nearly four years after its initial tease.

The Pokémon Company randomly announced Pokémon Sleep back in May 2019, alighting a bemused internet. What could a game about sleeping even look like? Are they really just going to smack the Pokémon brand on anything and expect us to throw money at it? Should we feel bad about ourselves that the answer is “yes?”

The game was slated for a 2020 release. For myriad reasons, it did not come out in 2020. Or 2021. Or 2022. As the years wore on, the 2019 tweet that served as its initial announcement became a meeting ground. Pokémon fans ventured back into the replies, continuing to wonder when Pokémon would help them go to bed.

What makes the reappearance of Pokémon Sleep so exciting, then, is not that it’s specifically a Pokémon game about sleeping. It’s that video game fans have been burned innumerable times by companies hyping up projects way too early.

Studios have long made it a point to have showy press conferences featuring pre-rendered footage of video games that have no firm release dates. It’s why the release of the ultimately meh Final Fantasy 15, 10 years in the making, was such a big deal. I still think often of the still-unreleased Super Mario 128, for instance—a supposed Nintendo game that really was nothing more than a tech demo. And the infamous 14-year development cycle of the crappy Duke Nukem Forever is an extreme example of a not-uncommon phenomenon called development hell. Video games take a long time to make. We shouldn’t be shocked when gaming companies don’t get them out when they think they will, and yet, here we are: always shocked!

Pokémon Sleep took a four-year nap from the public eye. Of course we expected it to be doomed to an eternal slumber. How were we to know it was actually Rip Van Winkle? Whether or not the game itself is any good—much like that Pokémon game about brushing your teeth, I will surely download it and play it at least once, for the novelty—its rise from a seemingly eternal slumber is a win for the optimists among us Pokémon fans.

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Allegra FrankDeputy Entertainment Editor

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