News

Train digital pets to eat eggplant in this cute game

Digital pets used to be the big craze. The late 1990s and early 2000s flourished with numerous digital pet-raising simulators. From the ubiquitous monster-collector RPG Pokémon, the digi-pet raiser website Neopets, the weird creatures within Tamagotchis, the loving pups of Nintendogs on the DS, as well as a slew of others—digital pets were everywhere. As time passed on, the digital pet raising fad mostly faded away (my rare Snow Cybunny on Neopets probably starving to death to this very day). In a modern day effort to reinvigorate the digital pet genre, smartphone game Pakka Pets was born. Pakka Pets bustles…

News

Finally, a game where you’re the Tamagotchi and a kid toys with you

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…