Whimside

I admit that the genre of idle games, those games that run in the background of your screen, but don't obstruct other activities on the PC (such as surfing the internet, playing YouTube videos, or... well, working) were not my first choice when I set out to play more games this year, but here we are.

The good thing about these titles is that they are simple, require little interaction with the player, and they are usually aware that they will be played for a few days, maybe a week, before being pushed aside for something else. Well, that's the premise with which I came to Whimside 10 working days ago, and I'm still engaged with it because this game offers an extra layer of gameplay that keeps you entertained for longer.

I was expecting something much simpler, after my experience with Rusty's Retirement, but here I've found a sort of Tamagotchi-style game mixed with a Pokémon nursery, in which we have to capture creatures called whimlings, which have a thousand and one ways to be found in the wild. There are dozens of combinations of their main features, such as head, body, ears, and tail, as well as the colour of their fur or the colour palette of their skin.

The goal here is, through a kind of selective breeding and lots and lots of eugenics, to find a combination of traits according to what a magical portal asks of us, which when offered the right whimling rewards us with magical crystals with which to expand our capture area, our breeding area, or open access to more biomes.

The crux of the matter is that getting the right traits can be quite time consuming, at least in the early stages of the game, as unlocking each trait requires you to first capture a wild whimling specimen that possesses it. Then, in addition, you'll need to "gather" them together in the hatchery so that together they will lay an egg and, hopefully, the offspring will have those desired traits. Yes, it may sound a bit ominous, but in the end it boils down to a relaxed experience where you simply click from time-to-time to capture a critter on screen and crack open eggs. It's almost as if you were opening a trading card game packet every five minutes, only with these cute little critters as the main characters.

The interface doesn't have much mystery, although the initial tutorial is a bit more dense than other games of the same style. Whimside, as I said, is not complicated nor does it pretend to be, but it has some small additional layers of gameplay and a random component that undoubtedly makes the progression less consistent than other idle games.

The good thing is that, like most games of this type, you can almost completely minimise it on screen and forget about it for a while, or even hours, and it has little impact on your gameplay.

Whimside is a small title where, if you're consistent and want to enjoy the classic Pokémon nursery mini-game experience, but with an added twist, it might be for you.