A frightening new version of a Gen-I Pokémon makes its creepy debut.

There’s a new installment coming soon for one of the biggest Japanese-made, worldwide-hit video game franchises. And while we’re still a few months away from being able to play it for ourselves, the developers wanted to give fans a little taste of what’s in store for them come launch day, releasing a chilling teaser video.

As it opens, we see an investigative file for, as the caption says, incidents involving a building with an invitingly sweet smell. We then cut to our team of investigators, who have traveled to the house on a dark night to see if they can unravel the mystery, with body-camera-style footage bringing us along for the ride.

Pushing past a rusting chain-link fence, they arrive at the building’s entrance, noticing a purple puddle of some sort of dissolved material. They then step through the front door and, sweeping their flashlight across the shadowy interior, discover that there are pools of the substance throughout the interior.

“Wow, Resident Evil Requiem looks pretty spooky!” you might be thinking, but this is not, in fact, a preview for the upcoming entry in the zombie-infested series. Instead, this survival horror-style teaser is for Pokémon.

Though the human characters and their costumes sport stylized design cues from the Pokémon games, the environment they walk through in the video has a photo-realistic look that wouldn’t be out of place in Resident Evil, or Silent Hill. Some of the hallway sequences are even reminiscent of P.T.

But it’s not long until the team of investigators start encountering Pocket Monsters that have taken up residence in this creepy, puddle-stained building, and let’s just say that they don’t seem particularly happy about their uninvited guests.

And as for those puddles? Their scent starts to get unbearably cloying as the team heads up to the second floor, which it turns out is the dominion of…

…a Mega Evolution Victreebel!

Now, if your Poké-scholarly reaction is “But Victreebel doesn’t have a Mega Evolution,” hat has indeed been the case from the species Gen-I introduction 27 years ago up until now. However, in the soon-to-be-released Pokémon Legends Z-A, due out on October 16, Victreebel will finally gain the ability to Mega Evolve, and apparently the upgrade means an even greater volume of the Grass/Poison-type’s corrosive acid to spray at whoever it’s angry at.

This being a Pokémon video, though, there’s a lighthearted twist ending. As the investigators flee in terror from the rampaging Mega Victreebel, a hardhat-wearing Pokémon trainer desperately tries to calm the creature down. Eventually, he does, and as part of a follow-up interview he explains that he was trying to train the Mega Victreebel in secret, and that’s why they were hanging out in an abandoned building in the middle of the night.

It’s not clear whether the teaser video is depicting an actual mission that players will go on during Legends Z-A, or if it’s just a clever way of showing off the Mega Victreebel’s design. Either way, though, it shows that while the baseline aesthetic for Pokémon is, and always has been, cute, some of them would be absolutely terrifying to run into in certain places and situations.

Source, photos: YouTube/ポケモン公式YouTubeチャンネル
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