Pakmon

The weapons in Pakmon aren't rifles or bows, but creatures in cans. Guess what awaits you.

Pakmon is a Czech fan game from 2010, made by fans for fans. It's a turn-based RPG inspired by Pokémon, where you catch, train, and battle creatures with names obviously chosen for laughs (Piču, Valušce and co.). The story? Negligible. You're your own trainer and you roam the map to defeat opponents and their hordes of animals. On paper, nothing surprising — millions of copies of this formula existed. Here, though, it looks like a school project by enthusiastic kids.

You play in a classic window with a square world. You click, you walk, you run into rivals. In battle you see two creatures facing off, you choose attacks and calculate who'll hit the other first. The graphics are, let's be honest, laughable — pixel-art from the nineties playing at retro, even though it's not that old. The sounds are quiet nonsense. Nothing unnecessarily complicated, but also nothing that would grab your brain for a while. The battle system works, it's not bad, just boring.

Pakmon isn't on the list of games you remember fondly years later. It's not bad, it's not even an overlooked masterpiece — it's just a thing. A fan project with its own charm, but without the spark that would draw people back. It aged the same way everything else from that time did, but without that certain something that would make it interesting. The Czech scene is full of such attempts.

If you're looking for retro fun and want to see what it would've looked like if someone in the '90s created their own Pokémon on their PC — here it is. The self-ironic name of the creature Piču tells you what the author knew. It plays in your browser without a server, so it dies without internet, but at least nothing's at stake. Play it for a bit, enjoy its boundless silliness, then move on to something that'll grip you more.