Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / Getty
I’ve always considered myself to be a terrible sleeper, and now I have some adorable proof. Despite staying unconscious for what I believed to be a satisfying, even impressive eight hours and 37 minutes—in a cozy hotel room, provided by The Pokémon Company—I woke up to find that Pokémon Sleep had dubbed my sleep as subpar.
Pokémon Sleep is the functional opposite of Pokémon Go, as I learned during an overnight preview event ahead of the mobile game’s release. I use “game” lightly; the latest iteration of the Pokémon brand is more of a dolled-up sleep tracker with some slight interactive elements than a full-fledged gaming experience. Instead of encouraging you to go out into the real world to collect Pokémon, Pokémon Sleep asks you to go to bed and stay there. Then, when you wake up, it will judge you on how long and well you rested, then offer you Pokémon to feed and poke at accordingly.
A sleep tracker adorned by the cutest characters ever created is still cooler than a regular sleep tracker, and the idea of gamifying something that unexciting has long intrigued me. It’s why many Pokémon fans have hotly anticipated Pokémon Sleep—both because the premise sounds so inane and because it was first announced with nary a screenshot more than four years ago. When The Pokémon Company revealed earlier this year that the game would finally arrive this summer, we were delighted by the fact that we’d soon learn whether this would truly revolutionize the thing that anyone who plays video games is notoriously terrible at.