New Pokemon Snap Review

I half joked with friends when this game was about to come out that “2021’s GOTY will be out soon” and we all had a laugh. My desire to play the game was genuine and everything I’d seen of it in Nintendo Directs prior to launch seemed promising. Even so, I’m very much at odds with the Pokemon franchise these days. I liked seventh gen well enough, but didn’t touch Sword/Shield. It seemed that games like Temtem were delivering on the Pokemon concept in ways that actually reflected the twenty plus years of game design since the first two generations were released. By contrast, Pokemon games just seemed stale, not to mention going down a path of being “child friendly” to the point that it felt patronising to said children.

With all this in mind, I didn’t necessarily think that New Pokemon Snap would really be able to capture the magic again. Well, the joke’s on me. I’m no longer kidding when I say that New Pokemon Snap will almost certainly be in the short list of my games of the year.

Since there are people reading this who probably weren’t alive when the original Pokemon Snap released (fuck, I’m old), here’s a brief history lesson. The original game came out in 1999 during the late stages of the Nintendo 64’s lifespan, only shortly before Pokemon Gold and Silver. It was effectively a linear rail shooter, but you took pictures rather than shooting enemies and doing barrel rolls. There were six tracks (and a seventh special course at the end) and about 60+ of the original 151 Pokemon to find. They weren’t all easy to find however, and you had multiple tools like apples and a poke flute to lure rare Pokemon out. At the end of the level, you’d select photos for each Pokemon to be scored based on the timing, framing, quality etc. of your picture.

It was a simple premise, but an incredibly endearing one. The Pokemon multimedia franchise was full steam ahead by now, but few of the titles or mediums of the time were really able to showcase the charm of the setting better than Snap. Better still, it did all that without the battling and capturing that was at the heart of Pokemon. I love a good Pokemon battle, but the franchise always toed the line a bit with the “Pokemon are our friends and partners!” sentiment as you committed wholesale slaughter of pigeons and rats to make your flame lizard stronger. Pokemon Snap was an opportunity to really see a different side of the creatures, and triggering interactions like Snorlax dancing or Pikachu on a surfboard helped highlight that.

As more generations of Pokemon games were released, there was no end to the spinoff concepts rolled out with them. Some are good (Pokemon Mystery Dungeon), some are bad (Super Pokemon Mystery Dungeon), some desperately need to be revisited (Colosseum/Gale of Darkness). But despite being brought up fairly regularly by myself and others I spoke to with fondness, no new Pokemon Snap game was forthcoming for over two decades.

But now, New Pokemon Snap has burst onto the scene. And what’s most astonishing to me is not that the game is so great, but that it’s been developed in such a way to not feel like it’s been absent for all that time. Decades of game design and feedback has been rolled into this new title as if it was multiple iterations down the line of a series, not the second game. There’s a ton of stages, more than two hundred Pokemon varieties (each with multiple special interactions to puzzle through), the ability to save your pictures regardless of if you’re getting them graded, online interactions, heaps of replayability and post-game content, and so on.

The core concept remains the same: you’re on a linear rail progressing through the level, but you have full camera movement to take pictures of the wild Pokemon around you. You select one photo for each creature at the end of a run, and then you’re given a score. Factors such as Pokemon size in the photo, placement in the centre of the frame, whether it’s looking towards you or not etc. affect the majority of your points. But there’s bonuses to be had depending on the pose and timing of whatever the Pokemon is doing, whether the background is picturesque, if there are other Pokemon in the shot, and so on.

As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock more means of interacting with the levels. You can still lob apples at Pokemon to annoy them, feed them, or lead them to specific places to trigger events. You still get a Poke Flute adjacent ability to wake sleeping Pokemon or have them react to the music. Both of these were present in the original. Your new tools include Illumina orbs that tie into the game’s narrative, but which also make Pokemon glow and can trigger new behaviours or moments. There’s also a scan you can send out that highlights Pokemon you might be missing, as well as causes a brief moment of surprise to some critters that can sense it.

Scans are also how you interact with a lot of the stages themselves. It’ll provide points of interest that can serve as clues to hidden Pokemon or other environmental features. In some cases, you can even find hidden paths that you can divert into, often containing whole new areas and Pokemon within them. Some of these can be tricky to uncover, but can be readily accessed in subsequent playthroughs once found.

You’ll be needing those subsequent playthroughs, too. To complete your “Photodex”, every Pokemon needs four different photos taken of them. These are categorised as 1 to 4 stars, with 1 being plain behaviour and 4 being special or unusual behaviour. Getting all of the 4 stars can involve a lot of experimentation and puzzling in order to trigger. And since you can still only submit one photo per Pokemon, it’ll take you a minimum of four runs to fill out its entry.

Furthermore, each stage has a “research level” that increases as you find Pokemon and interactions within your expeditions there. Filling up the bar will increase the zone’s level and make the Pokemon there more comfortable with your presence, allowing a few more interesting interactions or close ups. You can swap between the unlocked research levels on a whim, so you can still go back and find specific interactions if you’d like. All it means is that there’s a ton of content to get through, and both the stages and Pokemon varieties definitely keep things play to play. Even without that, the allure of getting better scores proved more than enough to keep me coming back.

Perhaps the only aspect of New Pokemon Snap that didn’t evolve is… well, evolving. See, getting some of the rarer shots in the original game required nudging Pokemon into situations where they’d end up evolving. Most people who played the game can still remember smacking a Magikarp enough times that it went into a waterfall and emerged as a roaring Gyarados. That’s a really cool moment and satisfying payoff for figuring out the puzzle. So you can bet that the moment I saw a flopping Magikarp, I was ready to pummel it into unleashing Ultra Instinct.

Well, it turns out that there’s a Magikarp in just about every stage in the game. But not one of them can be evolved. In fact, that’s true of all Pokemon! New Pokemon Snap has apparently subscribed to creationism, because there’s not a single moment of on-screen evolution in the game at all. Any advanced forms you find come pre-evolved. The big moments that might’ve led to evolution previously are now tied to the 3 or 4 star pictures for that Pokemon rather than the unveiling of something new. It’s a bit of a disappointment, but it’s the only one.

Additional replayability is added through the Requests that your NPC companions will make. These are one off side quests that usually double as hints to luring out obscure Pokemon or their 4 star interactions. You follow the hint, take the appropriate photo, submit it at the end and complete the request. Some will provide minor rewards, like cosmetics and filters that you can add to pictures for fun, or flairs to put on your trainer card equivalent. More of these rewards and features can also be attained through milestones that are effectively achievements. It’s a good way to keep you playing after completion beyond just the score attack aspect.

Mechanically and design wise, New Pokemon Snap is strong all around. More than anything though, it really captured both the charm of the original game and the charm of the Pokemon setting as a whole. Exploring these beautiful landscapes filled with interesting creatures, filling those moments of wonder and discovery when something unexpected emerges from the next corner? Those are aspects that other Pokemon games have struggled to achieve for a long time.

The declining quality of Game Freak’s offerings may have dulled the spark, but New Pokemon Snap reignited that childhood flame in my heart at the wonder this kind of setting could offer. So both on that front and as a game, I can heartily recommend this one to people. I’m very glad to have played it and that something like Pokemon Snap gets to exist again after all this time. If this sounds like your kind of thing, then I heartily recommend checking it out.

So I had this draft mostly written weeks ago, but I never got around to finishing it purely because I was having issues getting pictures off my Switch. Given that this is a game all about getting those pictures, it’d be a crying shame to do a text only review, so I held back until I could include my own screenshots.

That more or less bottlenecked my entire writing process, so I’m forcing myself to finish this now even though I’m far from happy with it. I also edited this one in an incredibly sleep-deprived funk, so I probably missed some details or parts. Please let me know if you spot anything and share feedback so I can pretty it up later.

I’m tired of trying to predict when I’ll actually be well enough to function consistently again — let alone write steadily — so I won’t bother. There’ll be new content when I can at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later. Might just be more of these, but we’ll see. Until then!