How to play Detective Pikachu on Mac

Game summary

Detective Pikachu is an adventure game developed by Creatures Inc., published by The Pokémon Company, and distributed by Nintendo for the Nintendo 3DS. The game is a spin-off of the Pokémon franchise, in which players work with a talking Pikachu to solve mysteries. A shorter, downloadable version of the game called Great Detective Pikachu: Birth of a New Duo was released in Japan in February 2016, while the full version was released worldwide in March 2018.
First released: Mar 2018

Play Detective Pikachu on Mac with Parallels (virtualized)

The easiest way to play Detective Pikachu on a Mac is through Parallels, which allows you to virtualize a Windows machine on Macs. The setup is very easy and it works for Apple Silicon Macs as well as for older Intel-based Macs.

Parallels supports the latest version of DirectX and OpenGL, allowing you to play the latest PC games on any Mac. The latest version of DirectX is up to 20% faster.

Our favorite feature of Parallels Desktop is that when you turn off your virtual machine, all the unused disk space gets returned to your main OS, thus minimizing resource waste (which used to be a problem with virtualization).

Detective Pikachu installation steps for Mac

Step 1
Go to Parallels.com and download the latest version of the software.
Step 2
Follow the installation process and make sure you allow Parallels in your Mac’s security preferences (it will prompt you to do so).
Step 3
When prompted, download and install Windows 10. The download is around 5.7GB. Make sure you give it all the permissions that it asks for.
Step 4
Once Windows is done installing, you are ready to go. All that’s left to do is install Detective Pikachu like you would on any PC.
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