New Pokémon Snap arrived on the Nintendo Switch on April 30, 2021, twenty-two years after HAL Laboratory’s Pokémon Snap made photographing pocket monsters a pastime on the Nintendo 64. Bandai Namco Studios developed it. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company published it. The premise has not moved an inch: you ride a vehicle that drives itself, you point a camera at wildlife, and a professor grades the results.
Trailer, via IGN.
Professor Mirror and the Lental Region
The setup is a working ecological survey. Professor Mirror runs the Laboratory of Ecological and Natural Sciences, and he invites the player to join his research team alongside his assistant Rita. The region is the Lental archipelago, six main islands cut into areas that cover jungles, deserts, reefs and caves.
The survey has a second job. Mirror is chasing the Illumina phenomenon, a strange glow that certain Pokémon and flowers called crystablooms give off. An explorer’s travelogue documented it a century ago. Nobody has cracked it since.
The NEO-ONE Does the Driving
You travel in the NEO-ONE, a pod-shaped hovercraft that follows a linear pre-set path on its own. The player rotates the camera a full 360 degrees, uses the D-pad to snap the view behind, and can unlock a speed boost for a given course. Camera control runs on either the analog stick or gyro.
Each run caps at 72 photos. When the course ends, the NEO-ONE teleports back to the lab, which is the hub for reviewing research, managing the album, customizing the account and reaching online features. The lab and the Research Camp outside it double as a course of their own.
Night Courses Change the Map
The sequel’s clearest addition is time of day. Certain courses get revisited at night, and those versions can run different routes and show species the daytime pass never does. Courses also level up, which opens new Pokémon and new interactions.
- Night-time courses with separate routes and species
- Boss battles
- A photo rating system that scores how rare a behavior is
- Unlockable items that improve your shots
The game originally featured 214 Pokémon species, a count increased to 234 through updates.
A Silent Hero and a Talking Cast
This Snap gives the player an avatar instead of a named character. You pick gender and hair and skin colors from eight pre-sets at the start, and the choice locks. English promotional material calls the male and female avatars Jaime and River, though the game never names them.
The cutscenes carry full voice acting, a first for the Pokémon series, with shorter voice lines elsewhere. English and Japanese dubs can be toggled, and voice acting can be switched off entirely in settings.
Professor Mirror is voiced by Ryōtarō Okiayu in Japanese and Ben Lepley in English. Rita, his main assistant, is voiced by Manami Numakura and Anairis Quiñones. Phil serves as the player’s rival in assisting the research.
What the Camera Actually Asks
The game is a 3D photography title with elements of the rail shooter and puzzle genres. A high grade is not about centering a Pokémon. It is about catching a behavior at the moment it happens, and the rating system measures how rare that behavior is.
New Pokémon Snap introduces night-time courses, boss battles and a new photo rating system to indicate how rare a species’ behavior is.
That single line is the whole design argument. Rarity is the score, and a rare behavior is not sitting still for the first frame you line up.
Where the Restraint Shows
Bandai Namco keeps the ride slow on purpose. The NEO-ONE never lets you steer, so the only variable you own is the shutter, and the 72-photo limit forces a choice about what deserves the frame. It is a small, tight loop, and it holds up across six islands because the biomes genuinely differ and the night passes rewrite a course.
The cost is repetition. Courses get visited more than once, and the second trip is the point, but it is still the same ground under a different sky. Players who want the survey to move faster than the hovercraft will feel every one of those laps.
The voice acting is the stranger call. Full cutscene dubbing is a franchise first, and it is competently done, but Mirror and Rita narrate a mystery the photography is already built around. The Illumina phenomenon is a visual payoff, and the talking sits on top of it.
A Critic Aggregate of 8.1
New Pokémon Snap is not trying to be a big Pokémon game. It is a photography game with a research frame, and it commits to that frame completely: the lab, the grading, the album, the survey. The sequel’s additions — night courses, boss battles, the rarity rating — all push in the same direction, which is toward looking harder at the same place.
That focus is why it lands at an 8.1/10 critic aggregate, drawn from 12 outlets. The 72-photo limit and the autopilot path are not restrictions to tolerate. They are the game.
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