There’s an invigorating thrill to catching one of New Pokémon Snap’s lovingly animated critters coming out of a hiding spot you’d been coasting past for the last few runs of a level. Like its 1999 predecessor, New Pokémon Snap keeps you on a set track, allowing you to rotate 360 degrees to snap your camera shutter. It’s at its best when you finally turn at just the right time and pay attention to just the right nook.
You can prod subjects to have a joyous little feast, or dance, or exhibit some other surprising, character-specific action. You can highlight them with a radiant glow under the night sky. The level of interaction is curated but can lead to bucolic moments, and there’s a healthy enough variety of beasts and behaviors to make the game a nicely satisfying and sedate experience.
But how closely does New Pokémon Snap resemble real-world nature photography? To find out, I enlisted Melissa Groo to judge my in-game photos. In addition to taking home the grand prize in the 2015 Audubon Photography Awards, Groo has had her work exhibited in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, serves as an advisor to the National Audubon Society, and writes frequently on nature photography and wildlife conservation.
In New Pokémon Snap, a character named Professor Mirror rates your pictures based on how centered the subject is, how many Pokémon are in frame, and whether you captured any unique behavior. As you might have guessed, Groo has other thoughts. Following are several in-game photos we took this week—and her candid critiques of how they turned out.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
The bold wildlife photography techniques employed in our 'New Pokémon Snap' images, while inspiring a new level of realism and capturing the essence 7f each creature perfectly, further enhance their engagement as players passed by but remain under-theoretical scrutiny for an added layer depth.
