Nintendo Switch’s ‘New Pokemon Snap’ review: Meditative exploration and creative photo-taking

The gameplay will be familiar to fans of the original. You enter a pod called the Neo-One, which trundles along a predetermined path. While touring in the vehicle, you can capture images of the creatures you come across.

At the end of the tour, you’ll choose images to present to Professor Mirror, who scores them based on six categories: pose, size, direction, placement, other Pokemon, and background.

It’s an unusual system that gives you leeway to express creativity. The images that you produce to hit the high scores aren’t always the best-looking ones or the most artful, but the venture does require patience, timing, and a good eye for composition.

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While other on-rail shooters amp up players with frenetic action, New Pokemon Snap is more meditative and strategic. It helps to go through a level more than once so that you will know the ins and outs of the stage.

Memorising the location of Pokemon and how they dart through the route helps you to anticipate the best position for pictures. The game also throws in tools such as Fluffruit, music, and Illumina orbs, which can manoeuvre pocket monsters into favourable spots or reveal unusual reactions.

As you explore the route and have your photos judged, the research level of the stage increases, and that introduces new Pokemon and other wrinkles.

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There’s a lot to take in initially, but the developers at Bandai Namco Studios provide a decent story campaign to carry you along. You’ll take on the role of Professor Mirror’s research assistant. He tasks you with studying the Pokemon of the islands by taking pictures and investigating the strange Illumina phenomenon that’s distinct to the archipelago.

You travel to six locales, with an optional stop at the Research Camp. The first five isles of Florio, Belusylva, Voluca, Maricopa, and Durice each have distinct biomes and challenges. You have to experiment with how the Pokemon of the area react to your tools. Eventually, you’ll unlock encounters with special Illumina Pokemon and uncover clues about the final encounter on the sixth island, Aurus.

With that being said, the campaign isn’t built for marathon sessions. Instead, it’s best in spurts because of its repetitiveness, but the creative aspect and collection element help mitigate this. You have to snap photos of different Pokemon for your Photodex, and try to capture diamond-level scores and higher-starred moments.

On top of that, you can fulfil requests by research partners or Professor Mirror. This puzzle aspect of the game usually involves capturing a specific moment that you must create. In return, you’ll be rewarded with items to customise your images.

When the campaign is complete, Professor Mirror introduces a course score, where you try to rack up points for all the images in your 72-shot roll. That and the levelling aspect for each course creates incentives to keep playing after the credits roll.

For those who don’t care for that, New Pokemon Snap has one more trick up its sleeve. You can share your best images online and compliment ones you like through Sweet! medals, which are essentially social media “likes”. You can express your creativity using stickers, frames, and filters. But if you prefer real “likes” instead, you can also share your images via Twitter.