A wonderfully moody game that sees you exploring the nightlife of a crumbling, post-Soviet cityscape. Diegetic music and radio broadcasts invite you to encounters with strangers all in search of their own place in an indifferent universe. Where other experiences may become overbearingly nihilistic, Neyasnoe manages to find warmth in the pockets of life people have carved out as respite from the cold and dark. You share a smoke and ruminate on the state of things. You attend a poetry recital amongst friends. You drink and dance like fools into the fleeting night. What else is there to do at the end of days?

Underneath all of the detritus commonly found in mobile gaming and games-as-a-service models there is undeniably something compelling in Pokémon Unite. Though I only played as a couple of the characters on the sizable roster I quickly found an impressive depth to its systems and competitive rulings. Like other MOBAs the interplay between various characters and the roles they fulfil creates a great deal of variety in matches despite repeating objectives and environments. I am not someone particularly well versed in this genre of games but I nevertheless found it fairly easy to grasp. In that way it’s quite the approachable and friendly experience for a space of gaming that has a reputation for being rather noxious.

However, it is not long before one discovers a more insidious side to Unite that is only further exemplified by the Pokémon brand’s history of marketing towards children. That, of course, is the monetization that rears its head in almost every part of this game. This is possibly the most egregious nickel-and-diming I’ve seen for a hot minute, with everything from the playable characters, the cosmetics for those characters and your avatar, and boosters for the various currencies all funnelling into an ecosystem that will frequently remind you of the option to purchase these things with real money. This isn’t exactly new as far as free-to-play games go but what makes this an exception in my eyes is just how much money one could easily lose to Unite in a few innocuous purchases. Several of the higher tier cosmetics for the pokemon can cost obscene amounts of money. Want a Christmas-themed outfit for your Pikachu? That’ll be 2999 aeon gems, or, £45. There’s even a subscription one can pay to get access to a paltry sum of premium awards and a few of the cosmetic items on loan. Yes, a lot of the ecosystem seems to work by providing you characters or cosmetics for a brief window before yanking them away, as if to incentivise you into paying to keep hold of a character/outfit you had previously become attached to.

Though there does not appear to be anything in the game that could be described as “pay to win” in terms of giving you an edge against real players in the online matches, the abundance of quirky cosmetics one can outfit their favourite pokemon with is undoubtedly part of what Unite builds its aesthetic appeal on and I cannot simply write off these items as additional (expensive) goodies for those so inclined. It’s grossly exploitative of both the younger audience that will show up to anything with the Pokémon name attached to it and players for whom struggle with compulsions towards gambling or impulse purchases. It is a shame, then, that the inviting design of Unite I mentioned earlier feels almost like a trap to bring you into an ecosystem that so desperately wants to drain your income for all you’re worth. Most folks I imagine would get on fine and find something to enjoy in Unite, but it is the audience who can’t say no to handing over their money that keeps an enterprise like this afloat. Perhaps someday in the future when the online services of this game are taken down and you’re left with bot matches encased in the shell of a dead game you’ll be able to garner some impression of what made the core of this compelling, but for now I can’t recommend the experience of playing Unite when it’s marred by rotten business.