iOS (iPhone/iPad) User Reviews

I've been playing it everyday since release. It's bit hard to put a score on the game (as it is hardly a game) but I'll try. To start, it's an essentially an idle game that rewards you for "good" sleeping habits. You sleep, meet Pokemon in the morning and cook meals/gather berries during the day to increase your next night's sleep score. The music, the art and the sleeping animations are genuinely wonderful, unique and always super high quality (if scarce), which is somewhat rare for this franchise. If you dedicate enough time to learning this game, you'll learn soon enough that yes, there is a meta for Pokemon Sleep and that optimizing your teams makes the whole difference. The problem is the "game" part is done verly poorly IMO. In short, sleeping the max amount (8 hours 30 mins) is optimal for a good night score (let's you catch rarer/more Pokemon), maximizes rewards (i.e points to buy Poke Balls and other crucial items) and your Pokemon's energy (basically linked to how much they can increase your score in a day). If you couldn't sleep well, forgot to track or the game decided you took 5 hours to fall asleep, tough luck! You're screwed out of rewards and encounters for the day. Sleeping at the same everyday is also rewarded and "optimal", which is unrealistic for most people. Another thing I believe is also a pretty poor design decision are sleep styles. Basically, your night's sleep is going to be categorized into one of three styles. Pokemon are usually limited to one of these styles, so going after specific Pokemon is pretty hard. Of course, you can't really change the way you sleep, so you end up seeing the same mons every morning. Some people have resorted to manipulating the game for that reason. It's also massively RNG heavy. Each Pokemon has a specialty, main skills, sub skills and nature. Except for the specialty and main skill, ALL of these are RNG, so you can imagine how fun it is to catch a good, permanent team member, or just a barely useful Pokemon for a species that you like. And like I mentioned, it's not guaranteed you'll even meet that Pokemon in the first place OR that you'll catch em. Pokemon have essentially bars made of points that fill up when you give em Poke Ball cookies. The better the ball, the faster it fills up. Of course, they decided that the Pokemon can just get "full" randomly after one Poke Ball cookie. Again, a very fun experience. To all this, you might say, that it might be my fault for trying to no-life this game. Unfortunately, optimizing your team *is* really the game here. That's all you really do besides feeding and catching Pokemon, which is mostly brainless. The real "fun" is trying to find the best combination of team members for that week's Snoralx and island, switch up members at times, and maximize your score. Yes, the sleeping Pokemon are cute, but I wouldn't consider looking at them "game play". TLDR: Art is great, rewards unrealistic sleeping habits, gameplay/progression is extremely RNG. Only recommended for casual play.

Why is this game so complicated and impossible to progress? I tried learning the mechanics, and I just don't see the point of how anything works.

At first I didn't understand the point of this. It's a mediocre sleep tracker and has prety minimal gameplay, but sticking with it is really rewarding. It's the core pokemon formula diluted down to periodic busywork giving you 3-7 chances at catching new pokemon every day. It unironicaly does what PLA set out to do and succeded where PLA failed.