The success of Detective Pikachu has proven that there’s still a huge market for that electric mouse and all of his pocket monster friends, but there still won’t be another real Pokémon video game sequel until later this year. To make that wait a little easier, the Pokémon Company has announced a new project that sounds like an absolute blast, introducing an unbelievably thrilling new way to interact with your favorite Pokémon. It’s called Pokémon Sleep, and it’s literally about tracking how much you sleep to… do something with Pokémon, sort of like how Pokémon Go turned walking and looking at your phone while outside into a game, except… you’re sleeping.
Alright, that doesn’t make it sound particularly thrilling at all, and we barely know anything other than that, but Game Informer says the goal of the game(?) is to have players “look forward to waking up every day.” To do this, Pokémon Sleep will use a new device called the Pokémon Go Plus + (that’s “plus plus”) that can track your steps and other Pokémon Go-related things while you’re awake and then track your sleep while you’re “playing” Pokémon Sleep (a.k.a. “sleeping”). In other words, Nintendo and the Go developers at Niantic Labs can keep their hooks in you at all hours of the day, which would be a little scary if it were about any company other than Nintendo. Funny how that works.
Pokémon Sleep is coming in 2020, so make sure to avoid sleeping too much before then. You don’t want to waste any valuable time you could spend… doing whatever you’ll end up doing in Pokémon Sleep. (We would assume it involves catching and training Pokémon, but this is a company that is making something called Pokémon Go Plus +, so who knows.)