I broke my no-buy challenge for this game.

A little background: I’d been on a no-buy challenge since July 2025. Almost seven months of not buying a single game. I was just waiting for the one game that would eventually break the ban. And I chose Pokopia.

So yeah — I went into this with expectations. You don’t break a seven-month streak for just any game.

Here’s my hot take: I am not a big fan of Pokopia.

On the one hand, yes. It’s charming. It’s cute. I love how it looks, I love the idea of it, I love finding new Pokemon. I get the high reviews. I get the praise. I understand why everyone loves it.

But it makes me stressed. It does not relax me.

Every time I boot it up, I end up roaming around doing nothing and everything. And when I turn it off, I never feel satisfied. There’s this open loop hanging over me. Like I didn’t accomplish anything, but I also didn’t rest. I just… existed in it, anxiously.

Part of the problem is the FOMO. You’re walking somewhere with a plan, and then something shines in the corner of your eye, or rustles in a bush, and you think: if I don’t get that now, it’ll be gone. I know that’s probably not true. The game hasn’t told me “this is your only chance.” But somewhere over the years I’ve learned to feel that urgency anyway. So I chase every sparkle, and my plan evaporates, and half an hour later I’ve done nothing I set out to do.

It’s almost become a job. I’m writing things down in a notebook to organize my storage. That’s not relaxation. That’s project management.

Last night, I turned it on around 10pm — late, because my son went to bed late, which is a whole other thing. I was already tired. I had a plan: continue the story in the second area. Do the mission. After half an hour, I hadn’t done any of it. I’d just walked around the map picking up resources because I might need these later. I turned it off and felt empty. Dissatisfied. A bit stressed because I didn’t finish what I wanted to finish.

And here’s the thing — I think this might be a me problem more than a game problem. Or maybe it’s a life stage problem.

Because I just came off Dragon Quest XI, and then started Dragon Quest V. I’ve never been a JRPG person, but Dragon Quest hooked me hard. And even though it’s full of things I’d normally hate — grinding, backtracking, talking to every NPC — somehow Dragon Quest makes all of it feel good. Rewarding. I can open a session, play one chunk, hit a natural stopping point, and close the game feeling complete.

Maybe that’s what Pokopia doesn’t have. Natural stopping points. Natural closed loops.

In my 20s, that would’ve been fine. I could play for four hours and not care about structure. But now I’m in my 40s, I’m tired all the time, and I game in stolen moments after my kid goes to bed. I need a game to give me a sense of closure in 30 minutes. I need the loop to close.

Maybe that’s the real takeaway here. It’s not that Pokopia is bad. It’s that I’ve changed. The games that work for me now are the ones that respect the fact that my time is fractured and my energy is finite. The ones that let me feel like I did something, even in a short session.

I think I need closed loops now. And I don’t think that’s something to feel bad about.