How to play
A minute of real play: a starter, the first fights, the map, an alpha, your island.
The loop
The whole loop in six steps. Nothing here spoils anything — the places, the critters guarding them and how it ends are all yours to find.
Your critter roams the bottom of your screen while you get on with whatever you were doing. The ground it covers is counted as steps, and the world asks for those before it lets you further in.
Every so often something appears in the grass beside your pet. Click your pet and a fight starts. Win, and that critter goes into your records.
Every critter and every move has a type, and the chart decides whether a hit lands hard or barely at all. A lower-level critter with the right type beats a higher one with the wrong one.
Winning gives experience. Enough of it and a critter evolves into something else — which is also how its line grows toward the rarer shapes it can take.
Press M and your critter is standing on the map. Each land is fogged off until you have covered the ground, won fights inside it, and beaten the critter that holds it. Steps alone would make progress a reward for leaving the machine switched on, so the world also wants you to have actually played.
There are three saves. Start a second one as a SANDBOX to play with every critter from the start — it earns no crests, so your real collection stays yours to earn.
Keyboard or mouse: every button, row and tab on the device can be clicked. Give any button a key of your own in CONTROLS, and if you forget what does what, HOW TO PLAY is on the device itself.
The device
Everything runs through a pocket instrument called the CRITTERSCOPE. It opens on a hotkey and closes the same way.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| SCAN | The one that says yes. Picks, attacks, confirms. |
| BACK | The one that says no. Backs out, and flees a fight. |
| SORT | Changes what you are looking at — the filter, the form, the lineup. |
| PULSE | The second action, whatever the screen in front of you calls it. |
| D-PAD | Moves the cursor, and flips between forms and pages. |
| GEAR | Settings, from any screen, and back to exactly where you were. |
| M | The map. Walk it with WASD or a click; Q lists everywhere you have reached. |
| C | The compendium: every critter you have met, and the shapes of the rest. |
| V | The crest shrine. SORT there makes a card of your collection to send someone. |
| I | Your island, which grows as you play. |
| T | The specimen card: one critter, everything it is. |
The game ships with a player guide that goes considerably further than this. It is in the download, and it does have spoilers in it.
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