Initial Pokopia thoughts
I'm far from the first person to say this, but Pokopia is really phenomenally good. It's a voxel building/crafting/nurturing game where you play a Pokemon, Ditto, who has assumed the form of a human Pokemon trainer in order to take care of other Pokemon in a vaguely post-apocalyptic Pokemon world.
The game does an incredible job of making you feel like a dumb little Pokemon who is gradually exploring and mastering a fallen world. There's a couple moments where you discover cryptic spaces that the missing humans left behind, then scrounge and disassemble and re-build them into spaces you can call your own. It's got a really fantastically weird vibe. A lot of the structures in the game are so ambiguous that you cannot really tell what they were originally supposed to be. Trying to figure out what a ruin "was" in the world of Pokemon is a crazy good idea for a building and exploration game like this!!
I'm also impressed by the story. It's simultaneously appropriate for very little kids, but also kind of dark! Spoilers ahead... the humans are gone-gone, really probably not coming back. All the characters around you are constantly thinking of ways to bring their beloved humans back to earth, but you, the player, grow more and more painfully aware that all these cute little animals are going to probably be disappointed. Beginning in the second zone you access, the game even begins explaining to you - through text findables - how gone-gone the humans actually are. I haven't gotten to the end of the game yet, so I don't know how it will all be resolved, but it's pretty clear from both the story and the gameplay that the game is not going to be adding fully present, animated and arted-up humans to these environments. That's not how games spend their development budgets, haha.
Having every character constantly wistfully pleading for the impossible return of their trainers - essentially their parents - is a wild vibe for such a comfortable, cute kids' game. Pokemon is the only IP I'm stupid about - I will play nearly any Pokemon game without asking a second question about it - so I've played a ton of these games over the last decade. The only other one I played recently which hit this dark of a tone was Pokemon Legends: Arceus, which features a third-act section that is weirdly real-talk about some very dark abandonment stuff. I'm fascinated by these attempts to do kid-friendly despair, wistfulness, post-human apocalypses, etc, because Pokemon games tend to actually deliver on this stuff. Both of these games seem to be presenting this stuff in a context that would actually work for kids.
Anyway... it's a great game in lots of other ways too! But the vibe is crazy, and I'm really loving it!