New Pokémon mobile game, Pokémon Sleep, promises to turn sleeping into entertainment【Video】

Pikachu wants you to get some sleep, and the new Pokémon Home system will allow you to transfer Pocket Monster species from one game to another via cloud memory.

At one point or another, just about every video game fan has been in a situation where they thought “I want to keep playing, but I really should go to sleep.” It’s an understandable dilemma, since the very best games create an atmosphere where you can’t wait to see what’s over the next mountain or inside the next treasure chest.

But what if your love of games could actually encourage you to have better sleep habits? That could soon be the case, if your love is for Pokémon.

Unveiled during a Pokémon Company’s press conference, the teaser trailer for Pokémon Sleep starts off by referencing how geography-based mobile game Pokémon GO has reacquainted players around the world with the joy of taking a long walk, and how all that extra stretching of legs has had a positive impact on their health. But the scene then switches to a man who’s not only not walking, he’s not even standing up. Instead, he’s lying down in bed, with a Poké Ball-like device next to his pillow.

As he slumbers, a Pikachu quietly hops onto the bed and yawns adorably before curling up into a ball and dozing off too.

Once both Pokémon and Trainer are asleep, the on-screen counter moves from “0.00 hour” to “0.01 hour,” showing that the Poké Ball gadget is measuring their sleeping time.

“Pokémon made walking into entertainment,” says the narrator. “Our daily life has become more active, colorful, and fulfilling, but this is just the beginning. Pokémon could enrich our everyday lives even further.”

“Pokémon’s next challenge is to make sleeping entertainment,” Pokémon Company president Tsunekazu Ishihara explains in the video. While he doesn’t get into the specifics of how this will work, he does say that Pokémon Sleep is being developed in partnership with Select Button, makers of mobile game Pokémon: Magikarp Jump, and is scheduled to launch in 2020.

The teaser promises that when Pokémon Sleep launches it will “make waking up in the morning a game to look forward to,” which implies some sort of gameplay options or rewards that unlock with the morning sun. However, they apparently aren’t simply clock-based, since the video shows that in order to “play” the game, you’ve got to have accumulated actual hours of sleep.

As for the device seen in the Pokémon Sleep teaser, it’s made by Nintendo, and is a follow-up to the company’s Pokémon GO Plus and Poké Ball Plus peripherals for Pokémon GO and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu!/Eevee! Called Pokémon GO Plus +, the new device can be used like an ordinary Pokémon GO Plus to capture Pokémon GO Pocket Monsters and collect PokéStop items during the day, but at night is meant to be used as a sleep sensor that measures your sleeping time and automatically sends it to the Pokémon Sleep app on your phone.

The Pokémon Company also announced an interesting development for wide-awake fans, called Pokémon Home, which will launch in early 2020. Developed in response to the influx of new fans whose first Pokémon games were GO or Let’s Go, Pikachu!/Eevee!, Pokémon Home will allow users to store and trade Pokémon species they’ve captured via a cloud memory service, with support for Nintendo 3DS Pokémon titles compatible with the Pokémon Bank cloud service, Pokémon GO, Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu!/Eevee! and the upcoming new mainline installments Pokémon Sword and Shield.

▼ The diagram only shows arrows leading from Pokémon Home to Pokémon Sword and Shield., however, so it’s not clear if you can transfer Pokémon species into the other games on the list, or will only be able to import members of your Pokémon GO and Let’s Go rosters into Sword and Shield.

Speaking of Sword and Shield, the Pokémon Company says more information on the paired Nintendo Switch games will be coming in a separate Pokémon Direct conference on June 5. The live stream is scheduled to start at 10 p.m., and since Pokémon Sleep won’t be out then to make us go to bed, we’ll be staying up late to watch it.

Source, images: YouTube/ポケモン公式YouTubeチャンネル
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