The Pokemon Company invited me to a sleepover this week to try out Pokemon Sleep, its upcoming sleep tracking game for mobile. I already spent practically all of my waking hours thinking about Pokemon, so why shouldn’t I think about them in my sleep too? Pokemon Sleep is the latest attempt to gamify everyday life with Pokemon following the success of Pokemon Go, which we all know and used to love and now kinda like maybe, and Pokemon Smile, a toothbrushing app that teaches kids how to brush the Pokemon way, I assume.
Sleep is surprisingly dense, with gameplay closer in complexity to Go than Smile. There are points to earn, Pokemon friends to make, a daytime component that involves feeding Snorlax home-cooked meals, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, plenty of microtransactions to help you increase your gains while you sleep. Pokemon Sleep has been in development for many years and it shows, but I’m not convinced I need a battle pass to help me sleep better.
The event took place at a hotel in Santa Monica just a block away from the beach. After checking in and spending some time in the warmest pool ever, I made my way into the event area where drinks and appetizers were served alongside photo opportunities with sleepy Pokemon plushies and someone dressed like Snorlax. Pokemon always goes all-out for its events, and this was no exception. It was so cozy there that I caught IGN’s Joshua Yehl napping in a tent before the presentation even started.
After an hour of snacking and catching up with other journalists and content creators, app product marketing manager Yuri Horie pulled us together to explain how Pokemon Sleep works. The goal is to help Professor Neroil (an oil from an orange tree? They’re stretching it) research Drowsy Power, an ability that Snorlax has that causes wild Pokemon to gather around it to sleep. Each night when you go to bed, the app will track your sleep and reward you based on the quality and length of your slumber. First, you’ll attract Pokemon based on the type of sleeper you are. The categories are Dozing, Snoozing, and Slumbering, which correlate to how deeply you sleep. Depending on your sleep style that night, different kinds of Pokemon will be gathered around Snorlax when you wake up, at which point you can catalog them in your Sleep Style Dex and give them treats, which will increase your friendship rating with each one and encourage them to join your team.
You’ll also earn points based on how long you sleep. Your points are calculated by multiplying Snorlax’s Drowsy Power (which you increase by feeding Snorlax throughout the week) and how many hours you slept. You’ll get 100 points for sleeping 8.5 hours, which I don’t expect I’ll ever achieve, but it’s something to work towards I guess. The points you earn unlock consumable items and convert into a currency you can spend on more items. There are two different shops, a normal and a premium, and the premium is only available if you pay $10/month for a Premium Sleep Pass. It’s also available at a discounted rate of $50 for six months, if you’re ready to commit to the Pokemon Sleep lifestyle.
During the day, you’ll be feeding your Snorlax to increase its Drowsy Power. The Pokemon on your team will collect berries and you’ll need to tap them periodically to feed these berries to Snorlax. You can also cook meals for it using the resources you’ve earned (or purchased) that have long-term effects, like increasing the amount of points you earn each night. You’ll start over each Monday with a new Snorlax and need to build its power backup throughout the week. Each Snorlax has different tastes and favorite berries, so you’ll need to adjust your Pokemon team and buy different food to maximize what you can earn.
There’s a third shop in the store that uses a second currency called Diamonds. It seems like you can earn Diamonds, but you can also buy them in bundles with real money. Diamonds can be spent on all kinds of consumable items and upgrades, including expanding your inventory for more Pokemon, items, and cooking ingredients. It looks a lot like Pokemon Go’s approach to monetization, but I'll have to play a lot more than just one night to see how aggressively it incentivizes you to spend money.
I’m fascinated by sleep data and I love to look at my sleep patterns. When I first got my Sleep Number bed, I looked at my sleep tracker every night to see how long I was asleep and how well I slept. But I stopped looking at it after a while because I realized the data was meaningless to me. Whether the app said I slept well or not didn’t actually provide me with any useful information. I know I get poor sleep when I’m exhausted, what is the graph doing to help me?
Pokemon Sleep has a lot of the same features my Sleep Number bed does. It shows you when you were tossing and turning vs. sleeping soundly, and it records audio so you can listen back to see what kind of weird sounds you were making. I still think that stuff is neat, but it’s the actual game that interests me.
Pokemon Sleep is not a medical app, Horie was quick to tell me when I asked about the science behind it (though the developers did work with a prestigious sleep researcher in Japan, I’m told). It exists in this category of wellness-tainment; a kind of lightweight way to engage with your health without having to go through the difficult process of actually seeking medical intervention for your sleep problems. There’s some nice tips in the app and the sleeper tracker, if it's accurate, might give you some valuable insights if you’re truly pursuing better sleep. But mostly, it's just another way to squeeze a ritualistic gaming experience into your day. The Pokemon Company isn’t shy about that, it says the goal is to make going to sleep and waking up more fun, and I can see that totally working for me.
I loved seeing the Pokemon that gathered around my Snorlax in the morning, and investigating what kind of sleepers they were. There are 100 in the game right now, and it seems like each one has its own style of sleep. I had a Gastly, a Bulbasaur, and a Gulpin today, which were all snoozing adorably, and I decided to make the Bulbasaur my friend so it could help me feed Snorlax lots of berries. I also looked at my sleep tracker for a few seconds (I scored a 69, nice) and thought “huh, that’s neat” before going back to cook a big plate of baked apples for Snorlax to munch on. I want to see what Pokemon show up every night and I want to build a team of elite Snorlax feeders to make sure I’m earning as many points as possible. I also want to get better sleep, I guess, but I’m not sure anything in the game is going to help me with that.