Pokémon Café Mix

Overview

Pokémon Café Mix is a free-to-play tile-matching physics puzzle game developed by Genius Sonority and released by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch, and by The Pokémon Company for iOS and Android devices, on June 23, 2020.

A successor to the studio's earlier Pokémon spin-off puzzle games Pokémon Trozei!, Pokémon Battle Trozei, and Pokémon Shuffle, Pokémon Café Mix has players using their finger or stylus to drag icons representing the faces of different Pokémon around the game board to match them, much like the mobile game Disney Tsum Tsum. The game features a distinct hand-drawn art style and a cutesy story where players are the owners of a burgeoning café for Pokémon (many of which can be recruited to help with orders).

Each stage can have multiple objectives that must be cleared in a limited amount of turns, such as clearing a certain amount of a particular icon type, forming a large link of icons, and achieving a high score. As players progress through the game, they are given new obstacles (or "gimmicks") that cannot be selected and must be cleared in a particular way (such as tomatoes that must fall into a basket or nuts that can only be cracked through special power-up icons). Throughout the game, players also recruit new Pokémon, each of which spawn a special power-up icon (which activates their unique ability) when enough of their icons are cleared.

As a free-to-play game, Pokémon Café Mix allows players to purchase the game's currency (golden acorns) with real money microtransactions, which can be used to acquire special power-up icons. It also includes a "lives" system that utilizes cooldown timers (which can be skipped with the game's currency) for retrying stages.

It is notable for being one of the few games for the Switch that can only be played in its handheld mode with touch controls.