Playing the test build?
Thank you. Here is what is worth telling me.
Anything that broke, obviously — but the more useful half is the rest: what confused you, what you got bored of, what you liked enough to keep. "Nothing crashed" is good news and tells me nothing.
How to send it →Ninety seconds
See it running.
What it is, what it does while you work, and what happens when you click the thing in the grass.
Trailer
Not recorded yet. Drop a YouTube embed in here and it fills the frame.
What it is
A pet first. A collection underneath it.
Nothing demands your attention and nothing has a timer on it. It is a creature that happens to live on your desktop, and everything else is there when you go looking for it.
It just lives there
Walks, naps, reacts to your cursor. Six temperaments, so a sleepy one really is sleepier than a playful one.
Something rustles
A wild creature turns up beside your pet now and then. Beat it and it joins the collection.
Steps are progress
Your pet walks while you work, and the road opens as it goes. Fourteen places, each with something guarding it.
No in-game purchases
Buy it once. No energy, no timers, no store, no currency. Every creature in the game is caught the same way.
The device
Everything runs through one small machine.
The CRITTERSCOPE opens on a hotkey over whatever you were doing, and closes the same way. It is where your collection lives, where fights happen, and where you find out what a creature is going to become.
Make it yours
The case, the keys and the screen all recolour. It sits on your desktop all day; it may as well match it.
Questions
The ones worth answering up front.
What does it cost?
There are no in-game purchases. No energy, no timers, no store, no currency, no season pass, no ads. Every creature in the game is caught the same way — by playing.
It will be a one-off price on Steam, and there will be a free demo so you can meet a critter before deciding. The exact figure is not settled yet — it will be on the store page when there is one.
Will it slow my machine down?
It is a few megabytes and draws a small canvas. There are no sprite files to load, because every creature is generated from a seed when it is first needed. It is designed to be left running all day next to whatever you actually use the computer for.
Windows only?
For now, yes — Windows 10 or 11. A Mac build compiles, but the part that matters most, the pet living on your desktop over other windows, is a real port rather than a recompile and has not been done properly. Shipping one that half works would be worse than shipping none.
Does it need an account or the internet?
No, to both. It runs entirely on your machine and your save is a small text file in your own AppData folder. Nothing is uploaded and there is nothing to sign in to.
Is my progress safe?
Saves are written atomically — to a temporary file, flushed to disk, and only then swapped in — with the previous save kept alongside as a backup. A crash mid-write leaves you with the last good save rather than half of a broken one.
How long is it?
There is no ending you are being marched toward. The road has fourteen places on it and the last of them is a long way out, measured in the steps your pet takes while you get on with your day. Some people will see the end of it; plenty will just enjoy having a critter.
- Runs onWindows 10 or 11, 64-bit
- DownloadAbout 4 MB
- AccountNone — nothing to sign in to
- InternetNot needed, ever
- PriceOne-off, on Steam — not set yet
- In-game purchasesNone — no store, no currency, no ads
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