New Pokémon Snap review – chilled photography game could be snappier

P okémon is nominally about collecting and battling cute monsters, but, like most children’s fiction that has stood the test of time, these games draw you into an interesting and believable place – one where kids can live their dreams and humans exist in harmony with quirky creatures. It’s a universe that has captivated a few generations, and for adults who grew up with it, their fondness runs deep. Even on a tiny, black-and-white Game Boy screen, what Pokémon has always offered is a world.

New Pokémon Snap has you looking at that world through a camera lens, as you glide serenely through different fictional habitats in a cheerful yellow observation pod. The Pokémon go about their business – a Machamp poses on the beach, Sawsbuck struts gorgeously around a forest, Combees doodle about in a meadow of flowers – and you line up the perfect shot. You need to be quick with the shutter to catch fast-moving airborne creatures, and patient to capture a dawdling Charmander in the perfect pose.

Photos can be saved, touched up and edited on the Nintendo Switch – and printed off, if you have a compatible smartphone printer such as the Instax Mini. Photograph: Nintendo

It’s not entirely passive. A well-aimed apple lobbed at a sleeping creature could make it fall out of a tree for an action shot, playing music might attract some critter hiding in tall grass, and scanning the environment might reveal a secret path. Daytime and nighttime trips bring out different wildlife – there are about 900 Pokémon now, a vast and bizarre menagerie for Snap’s creators to choose from, and they’ve featured 200 of them here, from all eras of the game’s 25-year history. It is like a slow-paced puzzle game, where each journey reveals a new discovery.

Well, in theory, each journey provides an opportunity for a new discovery, or a perfect shot. Actually, the repetition in this chilled ecological surveillance started to get to me; for a photography game, it could certainly be snappier. The game puts up barriers between you and new expeditions and photo subjects in the form of long conversations with the Pokémon professors and photographers back at the lab, mandatory excursions, and a story that feels superfluous. Your photos are methodically rated at the end of each trip, but in contrast to the notoriously withholding praise of the N64 version’s Professor Oak, I found this new prof so generous with his assessments that it didn’t feel particularly exciting to snap a gold-star pic.

The coasts and forests and volcanos are sometimes spectacular and always teeming with life, but, after the first few hours, you trundle through them over and over again, and though they remix themselves slightly, there are only so many times you can get excited about photographing an anime caterpillar. After the first couple of excursions around a new locale, snapping everything that flies overhead, emerges from the undergrowth or dances its way across a tree branch, you’re left taking marginally better pictures of the same things and waiting for something new to happen.

It is still enjoyable, because the Pokémon themselves are so interesting to look at; it’s just not wildly exciting. It’s a laid-back game and one that offers many hours of gentle photographic research to anyone drawn to Pokémon’s weird world – whether you’re a veteran of 90s Pokémania, or a nine-year-old newly captured by its charm.

New Pokémon Snap is out 30 April; £49.99.