Forget Baldur's Gate 3, the 1,000 hours I've spent with Pokemon Sleep make it my actual most-played game of the year

Look, I know that Baldur's Gate 3 might have topped our list of the best games of 2023, and I know my own glowing Baldur's Gate 3 review might make you think it would top my personal list, but I'm here to tell you that if we're to take hours played as evidence of total enjoyment, then Larian's CRPG pales in comparison to an unlikely contender, a game that I've played literally every day since its release this summer.

That game is Pokemon Sleep, and I'm not joking when I tell you that every night I've spent in my bed since July has been in service of what I still think is the weirdest Pokemon game out there. Writing this, I've logged 1,084 hours of sleep across 148 days, and that number is only going to go up and up through the rest of the year and into 2024.

Alan wake up

Those thousand-plus hours are just the tip of the iceberg. I've been logging into Pokemon Sleep multiple times a day for the past six months. The actual gameplay revolves around feeding up a Snorlax – a new one every week – with berries and meals gathered from your team of Pokemon. As each week's Snorlax gets bigger, the Pokemon he draws into his sleepy aura become more powerful, giving you the chance to add increasingly rare creatures to your collection. Add those regular feedings to my playtime, and we're looking at hundreds of extra hours over the course of a year.

You might question whether spending 1,000 hours asleep really counts as playing a game, but when hitting the hay is one of only a handful of ways to really interact with Pokemon Sleep, I'd argue that each one of those hours is valid. That said, I've been pleasantly surprised by just how much depth there continues to be when it comes to planning my team. Each Snorlax has their own preferences when it comes to their favorite berries and meals, and arranging a team to maximize on those preferences requires some decent forethought. 

For instance, my Victreebel and Golem are ingredient-producing powerhouses, pumping out the beans and potatoes that prove a staple of Snorlax's diets on a given week. But when Snorlax asks for a menu consisting entirely of dessert (which happens more often than you'd think), it's hard to convert those staples into actual meals. I can pull in Pokemon that cater to that sweet tooth, but in doing so, will I lose some of the growth that I might gain with stronger 'mons in my team?

The decision making runs surprisingly deep, but it's the kind of thing that will sound almost unhinged to anyone not as weirdly invested as people like me. It also distracts from Pokemon Sleep's actual greatest achievement - its ability to recapture the joy of the mainline Pokemon games. I'm just as attached to my Golem as I was to the Graveler that I couldn't evolve in Pokemon Sapphire because I couldn't find anyone to trade with, and I was just as pleased to find the Thunder Stone I needed to evolve my starter Pikachu as I was in my very earliest ventures into the series.

Pokemon Sleep was always a peculiar prospect, and that's no less true now that I've spent hundreds of hours with it. But the fact that I've been drawn in this successfully is testament to two things: the successful gamification of mobile systems is one of them, of course, but more powerful is the pull that Pokemon continues to have. Developer Select Button has captured the spirit of the individual creatures that have bought this series to live for more than two decades, and the fact that it's managed to do so in a game where more than half my playtime is spent literally unconscious is why I'm planning to rack up another 2,000 hours with Pokemon Sleep in 2024.

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