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 →The trailer
A tiny critter lives at the bottom of your screen.
A rainy working day, a critter that climbs out onto the taskbar, and the world it opens up.
What it is
A pet first. A collection underneath it.
Nothing demands your attention and nothing has a timer on it. It is a critter 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 critter turns up beside your pet now and then. Beat it and it joins the collection.
A world you walk
Open the map and your critter is standing in it. Fourteen lands, each fogged off until you beat what holds the one you are in.
No in-game purchases
Buy it once. No energy, no timers, no store, no currency. Every critter 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 critter is going to become.
A world you walk
The device holds a map, and your critter is standing in it. Walk it, zoom right down to the grass, and meet what lives there. Every save generates its own continent — and every one has a number you can share.
Crests, and somewhere to keep them
Fifty-five crests, on a shrine with a terrace for each kind — and a terrace lights up when you finish its set. Finish one and its shine is yours: a light the shrine can wear. Your island keeps the rest: a house that grows with your wins on that land, decorations from every land you reach, and a shrine that grows with your crests — and you can move it to any land you have reached. None of it makes anything stronger. It is a record.
Companions
A companion is a critter that never fights. It can live at the bottom of your screen like any other, but nothing battles it and it battles nothing — it stands with whoever does. Nikki is the first: she is curled up in a patch of sun on THE COMMONS, and if you walk up to her she comes with you. While she is out, once a fight, the first of yours that would go down holds on at 1 HP instead. More companions are coming in later updates.
She takes a share of what every fight pays — on top of what your fighter earns, never out of it, so keeping her out never costs you progress. Her levels buy more of the things she does and never more strength: she washes a paw, grooms, kneads, gets a scratching post and a ball of string, and at the very top sleeps in a shaft of light on your taskbar. She will never hit harder for being older, because she does not hit at all.
Make it yours
The case, the keys and the screen all recolour — five finished colourways, or paint each part yourself. It sits on your desktop all day; it may as well match it. And when a friend likes yours, a share code hands it over.
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 critter in the game is caught the same way — by playing.
It will be a one-off price on Steam, and the free demo is out now, 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 critter 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?
There are three saves, each its own game, so trying something out never costs you the collection you care about.
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 world has fourteen lands in it and the last of them is a long way out — past something holding every one, and a great many 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
- Install sizeAbout 10 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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