Poké Links

Poké Links turns the Pokémon cast into a map you walk through. You are given a start character and a target, and you have to travel from one to the other by hopping along real relationships — family, mentors, teammates, rivals and allies — one person at a time.

Every puzzle comes with a par: the length of the shortest possible route, always between three and five jumps. Reaching the target is easy enough; reaching it in par is the actual game, and only a par run earns three stars.

The strip at the top shows where you start and where you have to end up, with the par for the day. Below it, the character you are standing on shows their connections, each tagged with the kind of link it is — Family, Mentor, Teammate, Rival or Ally. Tap one to travel there.

Only the first four connections are shown. Anyone else this character is linked to has to be found by typing their name into the search box, which is why the game rewards actually knowing who is connected to whom rather than clicking whatever is on screen.

Undo steps back at no cost, so exploring a route and retreating from it is free. Three stars go to a run that matches par, two to a run within two extra jumps, and one to anything longer. The daily leaderboard ranks by fewest jumps first and time only as a tie-break.

Plan from the target backwards. It is usually easier to name the two or three people who are obviously linked to the destination than to guess which of your current neighbours is heading the right way, and meeting in the middle turns a five-jump search into two short ones.

Use hub characters. Ash, his companions and the professors touch a huge part of the cast, so routing through one of them almost always works — but a route through a hub is often one jump longer than the direct path between two people who already share a region or a rivalry, which is precisely where par is won and lost.

Search rather than settle. Because only four connections are visible, the link you need is frequently one you have to type in, and Undo costs you nothing — so it is always worth checking whether the character you are standing on knows the target directly before taking a step you cannot justify.