How to play
The whole loop in five steps. Nothing here spoils anything — the places, the creatures 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 pixels it covers are counted as steps, and steps are what open the road.
Every so often something appears in the grass beside your pet. Click it and a fight starts. Win, and that creature goes into your records.
Every creature 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 creature evolves into something else — which is also how its line grows toward the rarer shapes it can take.
The road asks for distance and battles won. Steps alone would make progress a reward for leaving the machine switched on, so it also wants you to have actually played.
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. Everywhere you have walked, and everywhere you have not. |
The game ships with a 33-page guide that goes considerably further than this. It is in the download, and it does have spoilers in it.