Don’t let their ostensible cuteness fool you: Tamagotchi, like babies and pets, are evil little monsters.

That may not be an empirical fact, but it is the worldview of Hitogochi, a game that reimagines the Tamagotchi-human relationship from the perspective of the toy. A new human arrives in your life. She is all excited to get to know you. She asks you lots of questions, virtually all of them asinine. It’s exhilarating to have someone focus so much on your needs—or at least it is at first, but the transactionalism of his relationship quickly grows exhausting. “Why is this person constantly asking me what I want to do,” your character seems to ask itself, and you’d be hard-pressed to disagree.

Hitogochi handles this fatigue in a manner that anger counselors would probably discourage. (To say any more would kill all the fun.) Nevertheless, the frustration that motivates this twist is well observed. The Tamagotchi thrived on a weird form of attention, delivered in concentrated bursts. This sort of hot-and-cold, controlling behavior would be maddening in any sort of human interaction. In the case of the Tamagotchi, then, it is only justifiable because toys aren’t human. This is fair enough—toys aren’t people, after all—but it’s not exactly a compelling argument. Insofar as the Tamagotchi was a tool to develop a sort of social skills, it’s strange that we never thought about all those interactions from the Tamagotchi’s perspective. Hitogochi is therefore a useful corrective to one of the 90s’ silliest trends.

Hitogochi is available for Mac, PC, and Linux on Onionblaze’s Itch page