Pocketpair has, all of a sudden, become a Nintendo Switch developer.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the company has launched their first ever title, Overdungeon, to the Nintendo Switch. We can confirm its listing on the Switch eShop for $ 14.99.
To put it simply, Overdungeon is a deck builder, which notoriously borrows from Slay The Spire. However, they have also added real time strategy, tower defense, and dungeon crawling elements. We’ll share the official description from the store listing below:
“Overdungeon is a real-time action card game that combines roguelike, tower defense, and card games! It’s easy to play with simple controls, is very replayable and a high degree of freedom! Conquer dungeons by combining cards selected from hundreds of cards! Is your trump card an alpaca? Or a dog or a cat? Or maybe a chicken? Build the strongest deck and challenge the dungeon!”
Overdungeon first launched in Steam Early Access in 2018, and was officially published a year later. As RockPaperShotgun reported, however, Pocketpair got into problems with the game’s publisher, and had to end support for the title to make money pursuing other projects.
In 2023, however, Pocketpair managed to secure the full rights to the game back, and so they were able to address the game’s laundry list of unaddressed technical issues.
Curiously, Overdungeon is leaving PC and debuting on consoles for the first time on the Nintendo Switch. And it’s not like we were hiding this from you, but of course, this is the same Pocketpair that is currently being sued by The Pokémon Company for patent infringement for their monster collecting game, Palworld.
We assume some fans, and maybe even some overenthusiastic game press, may not think this through, or be willing to do so, so we’ll spell it out so that everyone has to recognize this. What this means is, the whole time that Palworld launched, faced multiple controversies, leading to the lawsuit, Pocketpair was also talking to Nintendo to get certification and approval for their game to come to the Switch.
It adds a confounding, and also tragicomic, spin to everything. Because imagine what it must have felt like to be sued by a company that you’re also trying to start a business relationship with? And subsequently, some fans may be right to question, what were Pocketpair thinking inviting and teasing controversy by making Palworld so close to Pokémon?
But if this means anything, it may be that Pocketpair, contrary to what many Palworld fans expected or wanted, are inclined to settle with The Pokémon Company. That could also mean that they will more likely make changes to their game mechanics, to settle the patent infringements at the heart of the lawsuit. And it may not be legally necessary, but to get a good relationship going so that Palworld could come to the Switch 2, Pocketpair may be willing to change their character designs.
We are simply going to have to see how this all plays out, but given that this happened nearly a year since Pocketpair grabbed the world’s attention with Palworld, it’s quite the plot twist to start this year.
In the meantime, you can watch the Nintendo Switch release trailer below.
