Whimside Is An Adorable Fusion Of Desktop Pets And Pokémon Breeding
What if shiny hunting didn’t have to be so frustrating?
There are many ways to play Pokémon. If you’re in it for the singleplayer experience or want to crush your opponents in multiplayer battles, indie developers have stepped up with games like Cassette Beasts and Palworld that offer alternative creature battlers. Steam’s Creature Collector Fest features plenty of those new takes on the monster catching formula, but one of the best focuses on some of the most dedicated Pokémon fans of all — the obsessive shiny hunters.
While its inspiration from Game Freak’s famous series is obvious, Whimside is a very different kind of game, skipping combat altogether to focus on collecting and breeding your menagerie of monsters. Whimside also throws in a dash of Nintendogs while adding to the resurgent trend of idle games that live on a corner of your desktop without demanding your full attention.
Whimside feels like a clever twist on Pokémon and a throwback to old-school desktop pets at the same time.
One of the best things Whimside had going for it is its adorable critters. Just look at those puppy dog eyes and fluffy tails and tell me you don’t want to hug these digital critters. That sheer cuteness overload makes capturing its many creatures compelling, which is fortunate since you’ll be doing a lot of it.
When you boot up Whimside, it sits at the bottom of your monitor, showing a field full of critters romping around. Unlike in Pokémon, there isn’t an encyclopedia full of bespoke monsters. Instead, each creature is made of a random collection of parts — heads, bodies, ears, and tails — with one of several color palettes, so there’s a huge variety of critters available. Some parts and colors are rarer than others, and getting a monster with an attribute you’ve never seen before is always exciting. The downside is that these procedurally generated creatures lack some of the distinct personality of a Pokémon, but Whimside regularly produces fan art-worthy monsters all the same.
Your garden is a fully customizable space for your pets to play.
Catching a critter in Whimside is as easy as clicking on them, but the game puts more emphasis on breeding. You start with one hatchery where you can pair up two creatures to produce eggs at regular intervals. The resulting baby will inherit some combination of traits from both of its parents, which lets you take rarer parts like turtle shells and rainbow color schemes and apply them to whole families of creatures, rather than waiting to catch one with the exact attributes you want. When you find a creature you particularly like, you can let them loose in the garden to frolic with your other favorites and play with toys you leave there for them. Critters in the garden will also produce crystals you need to purchase new items and you can pet them to build your bond.
Whimside is an idle game meant to run while you’re paying attention to other things so there’s nothing too demanding about progression. It does offer some challenge, though, in the form of quests to collect specific monsters. Quests will ask you to catch or breed a creature with a specific set of traits and reward you with crystals when you succeed. The same system is used to open new environments, letting you drag the game window left and right to scroll through the map and find animals with different parts. Whimside’s demo contains a few grassy plains areas and one seaside region with more aquatic creature parts. Fungal forests and a spooky haunted region have also been shown off for the full game.
Whimside lives on your desktop while you do other things — like writing an article for work.
Whimside follows titles like Rusty’s Retirement in a recent run of idle desktop games, but it feels like a revival of the desktop pets that were much more common in the early days of home computers, which let digital animals run roughshod over your monitor, chasing your mouse or interacting with toys you tossed them. Whimside is significantly more advanced than any of those early desktop buddies, but it’s still chill enough to capture the same simple, low-effort joy of having a digital pet living on your screen while you do other things.
