It’s midnight. The room is pitch black. I gingerly creep into bed so as not to disturb the amorphous blob of children that may be residing somewhere near its center. I’m sleep-deprived but unable to turn my brain off. I pull out my phone and see a tiny notification out of the corner of my eye that my booster pack stamina has recharged. My finger taps the Pokémon TCG Pocket icon to open the game and collect my rewards. The light of a hundred dying suns immediately fills the room.
Even on my phone’s darkest setting, Pokémon TCG Pocket is bright as hell. In the morning, when I’m opening my packs and battling for Laprases while my coffee cools, it helps the mobile card game’s beautiful creature art pop amid the window glare. When I’m trying to sneak a session in while mixing formula or rocking a baby back to sleep, however, having Pokémon TCG Pocket open is like shooting a phosphorus flare directly into my eyeballs. At one point or another, probably every one of the game’s over 30 million players have realized how completely absurd this is.
“I really hope they add a dark mode,” one player wrote on Reddit during early access. “Will they ever put a ‘Dark mode?’” another player wrote when the game came out. “Dark Mode PLEASE,” continued a plea on Halloween. “Hot take: Can we have a Dark mode ui?” someone chimed in a few days ago. “I’m a designer and wanted to save everyone from blindness with…dark mode!” a fan wrote today alongside their mockup. It looks like every other dark mode app on my phone. I need it now.
There are a couple of reasons the status quo in Pokémon TCG Pocket is particularly bad. First, there is just a ton of white space in this game. Loading animations and default backgrounds all look like they’re made out of pearl. The result is like facing an oncoming car with nauseatingly bright LED high beams that never actually drives past. Second, because of all this light being output, Pokémon TCG Pocket absolutely destroys my phone’s battery life. A five-minute match ticks multiple percentage points off my meter. Before I know it, the whole thing is shutting down just as my Charizard has hit four energy.
Pokémon TCG Pocket needs a lot of things at the moment. Card trading for one, a feature that is missing but listed as coming soon. Also emotes, or any other way of communicating with opponents during matches. How else can I troll people when they make a mistake or their turn-one Misty immediately flips a tails? But more than any of those things, Pokémon TCG Pocket needs a dark mode. I let my premium pass free trial lapse today. If it came with a dark mode, I can promise you I would have re-upped. My family’s uninterrupted sleep and my corneas depend on it.