Thank you Nintendo for providing us with a review code for the base game and both Puzzle On! Packs!

Pokémon Friends takes place in a place called Think Town, which is famous for making Pokémon plush toys. Your character has always dreamed about making plushies there and has been granted the opportunity with your very own shop. The only problem is that your yarn got all tangled during the move!

In order to untangle your yarn, you’ll have to solve sets of three puzzles. There is no limit to how many puzzles you can do in a day and you’ll get a stamp on your in-game calendar for each day you complete.

The base game comes with thirty different puzzle types that can have over 4500 variations. It also includes six yarn types that can make fifty different kinds of Pokémon. You’ll have two rooms to decorate with three different wallpapers and six furniture pieces.

The Puzzle On! Packs are sold individually for $14.99 or you can buy them both for $25.99. They each add ten new puzzle types (roughly 1500 variations apiece), six yarn types, forty plush, fifteen pieces of furniture, four wallpapers, and an additional room.  The $33.99 bundle includes the base game and  both Puzzle On! packs.

There’s a good variety of puzzles and some of them are educational. It should come as no surprise that the characters involved are Pokémon-themed. You’ll have to guide various Pokémon to the flag by hopping on directional trampolines, smashing rocks, jumping on platforms, and guiding them in various other ways. Math skills are needed for completing number sequences and quickly identifying which set of Pokémon have more and, if so you’ll have to indicate by how much.

Many of the puzzles involve logic. You’ll have to rotate squares to make a path or determine what a shadow’s reflection will look like when a light is shined upon an object. In one puzzle type an object is sawed in half and you’ll need to indicate what the aerial view will look like in it’s altered state. You have a limited amount of time to solve each puzzle, and any left over time will be converted to more yarn at the end of the puzzle set.

Once you have obtained yarn from solving puzzles or by playing multiple days in a row, you can put it into the Pokémon-ball-looking machine called the Plush-O-Matic. The acquired yarn has a descriptor like creepy, frosty, soggy, fantasy, sparky, grassy, fiery, plain, toothy, or feathery. Each yarn variation is capable of producing specific types of Pokémon plush.

When you have a plush, you can display it in a room that you can fully customize, or give them to the townsfolk requesting specific types of Pokémon plush. Sometimes the villagers just want a small Pokémon for their desk while others are only interested in an elemental affinity. The toughest requests are for the people who want a specific Pokémon.

The plush Pokémon look adorable and the visuals are colorful and charming in this game. There isn’t any voice acting, but the background music is calming and sounds nice.

Pokémon Friends is family-friendly and there’s little to complain about here. Though evolution plays a big part in other Pokémon games, it’s not really mentioned here.

The mobile version has less than half of the puzzles and charges $10 for unlimited play while the $9.99 Switch version lets you play as many puzzles as you want a day. Overall, Pokémon Friends is a cute game that can bolster math and logic skills while having fun. Fans of Pokémon and puzzles should definitely check it out!