Is There Multiplayer in New Pokémon Snap?

I’m not a professional wildlife photographer, but from what I’ve heard of the profession, it can be a bit of a lonely pursuit sometimes. You can’t exactly be yucking it up with your buddies while trying to snap a photo of an animal in its natural habitat; many photographers can spend days on end all by their lonesome in the wild just trying to get that one perfect shot. While there’s plenty of Pokémon to interact with, is there multiplayer in New Pokémon Snap?

Neither the original Pokémon Snap nor its newly-released descendant have dedicated multiplayer modes, and if you’ve played either, you probably get why. The whole point is to be a wildlife photographer, waiting patiently for a perfect shot of a Pokémon acting like you aren’t there. Theoretically, one could hold a competition to see who could snap the highest-scoring shot, but that’s more for comparing pictures after a run-through is done rather than in the heat of the moment. If you were hoping for a two-player co-op mode like you’d find on arcade light gun games, I’m afraid New Pokémon Snap doesn’t have what you’re looking for.

Is There Multiplayer in New Pokémon Snap?

However, while there isn’t a dedicated multiplayer game mode, New Pokémon Snap does have online social features. Any pictures you take can be touched up and edited with fun filters and stickers, then posted to the game’s online channel, as well as linked social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. If you have a shot you’re especially confident in, you can post it to the community board and see how many likes you receive from the game’s user base. 

I suppose if you happen to have friends who also play the game, you could try running the same course concurrently and compete to see who can take the highest-scoring shot. Obviously, that’s not a feature of the game, just something you could do on your own time for fun. It’d certainly be easier to do that these days thanks to chat apps like Discord, as opposed to back in the 90s when you had to print your pictures out at Blockbuster.