6.7 hours played
Written 11 days ago
BUG: As of 7/12/25, achievements do not pop when they should. They tend to either trigger early or late, usually as the result of an unrelated battle. I got my catching your first mon achiement before ever catching a mon, after my first battle. I got my first double battle achievement after my third double battle. I got my fairy portal achievement way before finding out about the fairy portal, it happened when I caught a kitsune, etc.
BUG: As of 7/12/25 the fairy portal in the northwest of the Galadriel Peak town cannot be accessed. It's clipped into a tree, and you can't walk into the tree.
BUG: As of 7/12/25, getting the fire fae required me to have all the items, talk to the prof, get the same generic message about how the fire stone was interesting but my friends (who I had already talked to) wanted to talk to me, quit out of the game by killing the window, and then this took me to a save that I do not think I had made outside of the prof's house, after which she talked to me and gave me the fire fae. I want to stress that I made no other changes beyond quitting out and re-talking to the prof.
BUG: As of 7/12/25, you're in a doubles battle using mons A and B against mons X and Y. Mon A targets X and mon B targets Y. Mon A kills X, causing the enemy to bring in mon Z. Mon B's attack hits Z. I don't know what's going on here, but targeting seems to get defaulted to the leftmost available slot when an enemy mon leaves. Edit: This bug is actually intermittent, common, and kinda endemic to double battles rn. It can happen with any mon's targeting in any circumstances. It's not that the cursor defaults to targeting the wrong mon on turn start (it does tho,) it's that attacks targeted correctly on the second enemy mon will sometimes randomly switch to targeting the first enemy mon.
BUG: As of 7/12/25, Dark Bond seems to sometimes not require a recharge when used by an enemy. This is *not* the enemy missing its Dark Bond attack, which always skips the recharge. I've gotten back-to-backed with Dark Bond in a couple solo fights now. Player use of Dark Bond always requires a recharge.
Dokimon is an aggressively faithful throwback to Gold and Silver, right down to the interface being kinda clunky and ponderous. There are romhacks that don't cut this close to the original formula.
In terms of aesthetics, this makes Dokimon super charming. All of the mons have a great visual identity, the soundtrack hits the same vibe as the source material, and the writing might be the closest I've seen to mirroring og pokemon in a pokemon-like. I *did* almost skip the game because the name and the screenshots made it look like it might be porny, but this is a rare case of a completely harmless doki in an indie game title.
I do think Dokimon stumbles in a few places with its design. One of the earlier dungeons is an annoying teleporter maze that you have to brute force. And there's a few moves that *do not* feel like they live in the same country as balance. Dark Pact giving you a 25% heal and boosting all your stats and debuffing all your opponents stats is, uh, it would get banned in a competitive scene. You also have to grind a bit for a few random fights, because despite the game giving you items that supposedly distribute xp across your team, I'm not sure they work. And if your ringer is not massively overleveled or your team is not on par with your ringer, one high level enemy can flatten your whole squad.
It also might be on the shorter side, although I haven't fully verified this yet. I'm at 35% on the story with 2 hours of gameplay, so that might mean this is a 6 hour game. Or it might mean there's a whole back half after 100% story completion---I'll update when I find out.
Currently, if you have extreme gen 2 nostalgia or you really like monster catchers, I think this is a solid pickup on sale. It hasn't floored me, but it also hasn't been made fully unplayable by its bugs, which puts it a bit ahead of some other indie monster catchers I've tried.
Edit: The UI is so clunky to navigate that it took me three hours to figure out that I could swap out moves from the menu. And even then, it's a tedious process and every time you accidentally close too far out of it the game resets you to having your first mon selected and you need to de-select them and then use the not clearly marked at all cursor to maneuver over to the correct mon again. This and moves not explaining what they do when you're in combat feel like pretty big stumbles for the gamefeel.
2nd Edit: Having to do a teleporter maze in the Xelos City pokecenter to find the room in the back where Aki is recovering is... weird. There's no narrative setup for it, and while I like surreal elements and liked the pokecenter teleporter maze when I thought it was for random side content, putting a critical path event in it is headscratching. Also, all of these teleporter mazes require you to brute force them. I think that's bad design. Trying every door in every combination isn't fun, it's monotonous. At least the pokecenter one doesn't make you fight five million zubats while you're doing it.
3rd Edit: There is a guide. Thank goodness. But it might be a bit outdated (I did everything necessary for the fire fairy and the prof is still giving me old dialog about my friends looking for me.) You do need it, though, because some of the stuff you need to do to progress is pretty moonlogic'd check every tile twice type nonsense. Trap door in the upper floor of the Xelos City lab? And the hint is that a guy is looking in through the lower floor window? Yeah sure bud whatever you say.
4th Edit: Entering the post-game requires getting the third stage evolution of four random mons. I have none of them. The game thinks I have two. Something is probably bugged here, and anyway I ain't grinding this. The parts of Dokimon that are tight (the art and music) are very tight. Everything else feels like it needs a bit more time to cook. Or at least some thinking about *why* it's being designed the way it is. I think $20 is... probably not an amount I would voluntarily pay for this game. On 75% sale, it's completely fine. If you really click with it and don't mind the grind, you could support the dev by grabbing it at full price. I do think I'd be happy to check out the dev's next project, as there's a lot of potential here, but it's not a top ten monster tamer for me.
