How Talofa Games' Monster Walk aims to stand out from Pokémon Go

• Jenny Xu is Talofa Games' founder and CEO, half creative director and half engineer.
• The company founded after Xu won a Niantic contest in 2019, and launched its first game in 2023.
• Monster Walk is Talofa Games' second project, prioritising accessibility.
• As a member of Gen Z herself, Xu hopes Monster Walk's mental health elements will resonate authentically with her age group.

Walking-based mobile games have been experimented with for many years, racing forward with 2016’s Pokémon Go and evolving into new forms ever since.

Many such titles use a player’s location to monitor movement, tracking their position in the real world and encouraging them to walk for a prize at a defined destination: a rare Pokémon, for example, or a battle with a fierce beast.

Talofa Games’ Monster Walk is taking a different approach, opting against location tracking and instead rewarding exercise wherever it takes place with points in a pedometer-based system.

Speaking to the company’s founder and CEO Jenny Xu, we learn that the studio was formed at the intersection of her two core passions: games and exercise. Monster Walk, Talofa’s second fitness game and its second title overall, is an extension of this. The title is being built in Unity, combining walking with RPG elements, base building and bullet hell segments.

Xu suggests a pedometer approach bolsters accessibility, ensuring no rural player is left behind and that anyone can play, even if they can’t go outside. By building the game around steps rather than location, she hopes to better preserve player privacy and safety.

"You use your steps as the currency to play Monster Walk, so the more you walk in the real world, the more you can play," Xu explains. "To move up one square might take 10 steps, or it might take 30 to traverse a rock. So there’s a notion of physical distance to virtual distance that we haven’t seen in any other game."

By "banking" those steps, users can play when it suits them - during or after exercising.

This means players can constantly make progress while doing other tasks, using the in-game pedometer or connecting to a smartwatch and reaping the rewards later.

"Everyone goes to the bathroom, so you can always get at least 100 steps. That’s a core pillar of Monster Walk: every step matters."

One step at a time

Xu founded Talofa Games in 2019 after winning a Niantic contest, so the spatial tech company and Pokémon Go have been major inspirations for her. Her team launched its first game, interactive fitness title Run Legends, in 2023.

By early 2024, the developer had closed a $6.3 million seed round with investment from Chamaeleon, a16z Speedrun and more.

This gave the company greater "legitimacy" when looking to hire new talent, with its team of full-time employees currently standing at eight people. Talofa Games also has a global team of contractors, enabling additional engineering support and QA testing.

Furthermore, the funding has given the team access to support from a wider network of people, including investors from games, tech and healthcare.

The investment enabled Talofa Games to prototype various ideas for its next project after Run Legends, ultimately leading to Monster Walk. Xu suggests that this second title is 10 times larger than the first and is more directly aimed at gamers - an RPG with walking elements as opposed to a gamified app used by athletes.

"Only because of the funding can we do something so ambitious," she says.

"A year ago, we said, ‘Hey, let's do a hackathon. Let's figure out what we want our next game to be. Running is a thing that not everyone does - could we try to do something for even somebody who's never worked out in their life?’ So the idea came to try and prototype walking or steps-based activities."

Xu shares that Talofa Games split into two teams and made around five prototypes. It was the team Xu wasn’t a part of that conceptualised Monster Walk, and she liked the prototype more than expected, continuing to play for fun after the hackathon.

"Then we came back together, decided to greenlight Monster Walk, and the whole team started working on it."

Walk don’t run

Xu became a fitness instructor during the global pandemic. She realised she had "this love for helping people get fitter" and ended up creating Run Legends partly as a game to get people outside again.

While Run Legends was her "love letter to running", some people were put off by the title - overestimating the athleticism required to play. The team reflected on this when coming up with Monster Walk’s name, opting for ‘Walk’ over ‘Run’.

"You didn’t have to run to play Run Legends. You can actually just walk, but the fact that it was labelled ‘Run’ was intimidating," she explains.

"The welcoming factor of a name is very important, so even though you can also run while playing Monster Walk, in the end we were like, ‘Let’s call it Walk’."

Earning steps to progress without moving is possible through a limited number of rewarded ads. There are no direct purchases to earn steps, but boosters are available.

But the main way the game is monetised is through customisation options like skins and designing a player’s base.

"We don’t want to monetise your movement," Xu assures. "We very intentionally only monetise things like a two-times step booster, but you cannot get endless numbers of those, and it's not straight-up giving you steps. That would pretty much defeat the purpose of the game."

Target demographics

Monster Walk is targeting Gen Z as its primary audience. Talofa Games shared an earlier version of the project with 30,000 people and found it resonated best with this age group. Since then, Monster Walk has entered early access in select countries.

We ask why Monster Walk appeals to Gen Z, which Xu is a member of. She explains that this generation of gamers responds well to authenticity and a sense of belonging, and she believes the more a developer can appeal to that, the better their game will perform with this demographic.

"We took the companionship aspect of the best fitness apps I've used and mixed that with my favourite games, and that's really how the idea of Monster Walk as this cosy RPG walking game came to be," says Xu.

"I like to think about the game as a mix between my two favourite games: it’s got the quirky relatability of characters and bullet hell gameplay like Undertale, but lovable companions of the classic Pokémon series and real-world elements like Pokémon Go."

Xu also highlights Six to Start’s Zombies, Run! and Habby’s Archero as inspirations.

She adds that mental health is another key factor in Monster Walk’s appeal with Gen Z and is something that’s personally important to her.

"One creature is super anxious - she’s like, ‘Nobody will want me, I might as well run away’. Then you can take steps to catch up to her as she’s running away from you. Then you kind of watch her journey. So there's little stories like that of characters overcoming mental health issues and helping players find their own agency."

Talofa Games has also begun building an audience with Gen Alpha, a demographic Xu notes is "used to playing games".

She reveals that in testing Monster Walk, some Gen Alpha users have been reached through their parents, and those parents are "actually happy" their children play because it means getting exercise rather than being "glued to their iPads or phones all day".

The monster artwork itself reinforces Gen Z and Gen Alpha as target demographics. Xu states that one artist has drawn all of Monster Walk’s monsters, and that they have been "very much inspired by Pokémon and anime".

"We did a good amount of art tests and saw what our players liked over time, and evolved the style. The art changed a lot actually."

On the move

Finally, Xu talks live ops. She explains that Monster Walk has a main story campaign that may have a definitive end, but that the game will continue beyond this in the long-term with community-based events, like introducing new monster encounters when players collectively hit certain step milestones.

"One thing we’ve learned is our Gen Z players, when it comes to fitness, are much more collaborative than they are competitive," she explains.

"That type of live ops event we'll definitely want to add by the time we hit our official launch. Then, more shared worlds where you can walk together or have shared step goals that might tie into you and your friend getting a monster."

Monster Walk is expected to launch in the US on September 30th, 2025 to "catch the world" before winter.

"Then we’ll be in good shape for New Year’s resolutions, when the game has got more live ops pieces coming in."

To close, Xu acknowledges the competition a walking game like Pokémon Go presents. But she believes fans of the main series Pokémon games will find plenty to enjoy in Monster Walk, from the RPG elements to interacting with the creatures themselves.

"You can feed them, visit them, place them on your base," says Xu. "You can kind of move things around as you like. A lot of players actually spend quite a lot of time interacting with their monsters.

"Our artist is really good at blending this fun lightheartedness with something more epic - something you would want to walk to collect."