postcard from Rocky Ridges
May 25 2026
I had dreamt, once, about writing a blog post on a few games i was playing around the same time and that shared obvious common themes. There were Dragon Quest Builders on PS Vita, Ever Oasis on 3DS, 24 Killers on PC, and the big one: Pokémon Pokopia, the game that my partner and i were discovering on their Switch 2. I wanted to compare them, to talk about how each of these games was asking me to build (or rebuild) houses and towns, and ultimately meditate on what "home" meant to them and to me. I even still had Doshin the Giant on my mind, so i thought i could maybe draw parallels with how it had made me feel and what it had to say on the matter. This would be something i would have loved to read if someone else had written it before, so i figured it would be a fun and interesting challenge to try to write this analysis myself.
And then life kept flowing, as life does. I worked, i rested, i visited friends, i started therapy, i read, i experienced the world. Time and stuff drove me away from Ever Oasis, from Dragon Quest Builders and 24 Killers, and also from my writing ambitions; it's hard to stay focused on a project when that project is entirely about a bunch of games i don't live with at the moment.
Pokopia has stayed, though. Day after day, i've returned to its comforting wastelands, re-populating them with the same colorful creatures that helped me learn how to write and draw when i was a kid. I've offered them berries and shelter, slowly and clumsily rebuilding the different areas of the game. I've fulfilled their requests, progressing through the main story until i reached the end, and i've since then kept building, helping, interacting with my Pokémon friends. I'd visited the other games as a tourist, but i've come to see Pokopia as a place to return to: more precisely even, within Pokopia itself, i have been making myself at home in Rocky Ridges.
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Rocky Ridges doesn't appear as a particularly charming place at first: in fact, i hated it when i arrived. Picture for a minute a narrow patch of dirt crushed between mountains, practically buried under a layer of volcanic ash, peppered with depressing ruins of buildings that are too tall and too grey for any Pokémon to feel at ease in them. Add to that a sprawling network of caves, tunnels and ore mines that feel disorienting and slightly claustrophobic, and you have the perfect blueprint for a location i didn't want to spend any more time in than absolutely necessary. And so, after rushing through the main quest and unlocking the next region, i sighed with relief at the thought of not having to go back to Rocky Ridges, ever.
I don't really know what made me come back here. In the last area of the game, the dreamy Sparkling Skylands, i learnt how to build cable cars, and maybe i wanted to see what they'd look like perched atop mountains; or maybe i felt bad for the cute vegetables garden at the foot of the cliff, that had seemingly survived the collapse of the human reign and deserved better than being forgotten. Whatever the case, when, after watching the game's credits, i somehow found myself travelling back to Rocky Ridges, i had ideas in mind to make the place a bit more comfortable.
About 40 hours later, i have never really left Rocky Ridges. The place has been cleaned up, there isn't ash covering everything anymore, i've built a dozen or so houses and cabins suspended to the cliffside, i've made the big volcano hospitable and even quite cosy... I've encountered a bunch of new Pokémon as well, familiar faces from the earlier generations and new creatures that i hadn't even heard about before: they play with the stuff i've built, they run along the paths i've drawn; we also work together and they all help, each in their own way, restoring the area into a lively little town that has come to feel like home.
In his book Species of Spaces (1974), the french author George Perec wrote this quote that i adore:
What does it mean, to live in a room? Is to live in a place to take possession of it? What does taking possession of a place mean? As from when does somewhere become truly yours? Is it when you’ve put your three pairs of socks to soak in a pink plastic bowl? Is it when you’ve heated up your spaghetti over a camping-gaz? Is it when you've used up all the non-matching hangers in the cupboard? Is it when you’ve drawing- pinned to the wall an old postcard showing Carpaccio’s "Dream of St Ursula"? [...] Is it when you've hung suitable curtains up on the windows, and put up the wallpaper, and sanded the parquet flooring?
So what does it mean, to live in Rocky Ridges? When did it truly become home for me? Was it when i restored the railway to form a scenic loop through abandoned mines, hot springs and lakes of lava? Was it when i destroyed the ruined restaurant, saving the place from its gloomy emptiness and my sanity with it, before digging a cute little river where it used to be? Was it when i met Clefairy, one of my favourite Pokémon, and invited him to share my house? Was it when i suspended an entire troglodyte village to a cliff and connected it to the facing volcano by cable car?
Judging by online reactions to Pokopia, Rocky Ridges seems to me to be the area people least enjoy in the entire game. Players reshape the volcano, they move the cliffs away from the town's center to gain more constructible space, sometimes they even demolish whole mountains to unearth an old museum that rests on the other side of the map. The result can be impressive, and I admire the efforts of those who throw themselves into these tasks, but still that feels exactly like that for me: efforts, labor that would last for days before i could actually start building anything and having fun. I think part of how i've been able to love this place for what it is is by going along with it instead of fighting it too much. The buildable area is narrow so i've built vertically, inside the rock and on the cliff sides; i've been using local materials as well, mainly black volcanic rock, stone and wood. The only things i've really torn down are human-made structures, those sad giants that no Pokémon can truly live in, to replace them with smaller, gentler cabins and huts for my creature friends to play around. Maybe that's the reason why i was drawn to this place: since it has so many built-in constraints, since it's not as much an agreeable open canvas as other areas can feel like, it's tickled my imagination more than the rest of the game. It feels like home, not because i unilaterally decided to erase everything that was here and build my personal, aesthetically perfect utopia; but because i've had to adapt to its quirks and find my footing, my dance among its mountains so i could call them mine.
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I am a person who jumps from one activity to another constantly, often without needing much reason. At home, i'll cook dinner while listening to youtube videos, draw for a bit then read a few pages and boot up a videogame console, start working on a personal project and leave twenty minutes later to go shopping or on a walk. At the stationery shop, i'll check stocks for products we sell, and i'll get interrupted by two clients, wrap a gift for another or receive an order i made the previous week from one of our providers; and these days i fill every free minute i have between tasks at work writing this blog post, a few words at a time. Most of the time, i'm reading three books and playing a dozen games at once, not including board game nights and comics series. My therapist asked me if there are times when i don't do anything, and i answered that when i realize i'm not busy i pretty much immediately grab the nearest book. Every day, i try to make peace with the fact that a significant fraction of the things i do and experience won't be finished, but that the process in itself and the parts i live are already worth it: ten hours with a great game that could last up to sixty is still ten great hours spent.
In that context, it's a surprise for me -and a pleasant one- to find that i'm still sticking with Pokopia today, and to find that i'm also still writing things for this tiny blog. I don't always know what keeps drawing me here, even at such a slow pace. I don't plan posts in advance because when i do, i never end up finishing them (hi, forgotten list of round characters that i love, you were fun to daydream about). I don't know what a particular post will talk about when i decide to start writing one, and even when i have specific ideas they end up changing before long: it's been verified today too, even when i have serious analytic ambitions about weird games, i end up rambling about what i've loved in the latest game filled with creatures everyone knows instead (it's entirely possible i'm just not made for an academic style of talking about things, no matter how much i'd like to believe the contrary). I'm not even really sure why i write in english although it's not my first language, except that it's probably a relic from the times i was much more active on gamedev social networks. And likewise, i'm not sure why i'm still playing Pokopia or how long i'll keep playing before inevitably leaving it behind, as my ever-busy mind so often makes me do. My best guess is, right now, i'm simply having fun. I just feel at home on here and in Rocky Ridges, and that's absolutely enough for me.
(i just want to add a word tucked away at the bottom of this page to encourage you to play 24 Killers, it's really good, and cosy in an authentic and deliberately anti-cute way, something "cosy games" would never dare to touch. thanks, bye!)