| Quick Verdict: Whimside utilizes the premise of taking two Whimlings, breeding them together, and seeing what hatches. At first, I found it a bit confusing because it’s a lot to take in all at once. I missed the helpful details that would have been invaluable during the early stages. |
| Game: | Whimside |
| Developer(s): | Toadzillart |
| Publisher: | Future Friends Games |
| Review Score: | 8 |
| Cozy Score: | 8 |
| Price: | $5.85 |
| Pros: | I find the premise to be fairly unique, the mix and match of creatures is fun, and it sits on the lower-thirds of your screen so you can do other things while you play. |
| Cons: | It’s not quite as idle-capable as you’re led to believe, and you need to be fairly present if you want to advance. While it’s a fairly simple game, it took me a bit to grasp the concepts and to notice all the little helpful details. You can’t have several windows open at once in the game, which makes it a bit harder to keep track of what you’re supposed to be creating. |
| Platforms: | PC |
| Genres: | Creature Collector |
Whimside is first and foremost a creature collector with the smallest dash of idling capability. It sits on the lower third of your screen, so you can have it open and going while you’re doing other things. However, you will need to be able to pay some attention to it every few minutes if you want to see progress happening.
In Whimside, you have access to a small piece of land where Whimlings will pop in and out of existence. Each of these Whimlings will have randomly generated qualities about them that relate to a certain kind of animal. For instance, the first area is a Meadow, so you’ll see animal features of deer, rabbits, squirrels, bees, etc. You’ll also see some different color palettes pop up as well.
In later areas, you may see non-animal aspects like mushroom parts, but it’ll be predominantly animals.
Your goal is to adopt the animals with unique qualities so that you can use them to breed with in quests that I’ll talk about more later on. In order to complete the Meadow, you have to collect all the different head shapes, bodies, ears, tails, and colors that exist in that area.
I’ll be honest, the tutorial has a lot to say because there are several different things that you can oversee, and it’s a bit overwhelming. I got a little lost in the sauce and wasn’t quite sure what I was doing for… longer than I’d like to admit.
When it comes to the body parts you need to unlock, it’s all purely chance. You need to be attentive to the game because you can’t breed the parts you may be missing. They can only be obtained by adopting them when they spawn.
Fortunately, there are unique little sounds that play when a Whimling with an uncollected part shows up, but that does mean that you can’t walk away from the game expecting to see progress.
On the downside, needing to listen for a sound means that watching something while playing isn’t easily possible.
Personally, I recommend grabbing several of the animals in an area, not just the ones with unique features. It will help when it comes to breeding for certain combinations to have a wider range of parts in various areas or colors.
Once you’ve adopted a good amount of Whimlings, you’re ready to move on to the breeding portion and this is where you have the slightest hint of idling capability. You have two separate quests that you can breed for.
The most important thing is the altar. At the edge of every area is an altar that requires a certain mix of two or more Whimlings in order to open up the next parcel of land. The other one is for the quest board. By completing Whimlings on the quest board, you’ll be rewarded with crystals.
Crystals are something you can get passively by having any Whimling of your choice in the garden. This is a place where you can decorate the space and let a happy little Whimling live. As a thank you, they’ll drop a few crystals that you can pick up. This takes a bit of time to build up, so you may want a bigger payoff of crystals by completing quests.
Crystals are the currency that you’ll use when you want to upgrade things or buy decoration items from the shop. They’re vastly important for breeding because you can use them to upgrade your breeding station.
At first, your nest will only hold one egg, but by upgrading it, you’ll increase the ability for your Whimlings to passively breed several eggs consecutively. This allows you to turn your attention elsewhere while you wait to see what combinations will hatch.
So, how do you go about breeding and what is it really asking of you? This is the part that can feel confusing and overwhelming until you get the hang of it. It’s also where being able to open multiple screens at once would have been a deeply invaluable asset.
The screens will actively close in favor of opening another one. Why? I need the clutter for organization!
The altar and the quest board will tell you what they require to complete their tasks. So, for example, in the Grove area, the altar wants me to create two different Whimlings in order to advance. I’ll need to breed those combinations and have 1400 crystals in order to progress.
It wants me to create a ‘Mubogehe’ and a ‘Mugodeba’. No, you’re not reading that wrong and your eyes are okay. Instead of giving things names (because that would be impossible with all the variations), Whimlings are usually named by the first few letters of their combined parts, but sometimes they’ll be different if another animal is already using those letters.
The order is from top to bottom: ears, head, body, and tail. The color palette doesn’t figure into the naming scheme. So, in the Meadow, a ‘Donrarade’ is DONkey ears, RAbbit head, RAbbit body, and a DEer tail. You can see exactly where the influence of the name comes from. Sometimes, a Whimling won’t have a feature and it will be ‘NO’ in the name for NOne.
Meanwhile, in the Grove, a ‘Mubogehe’ is MUshroom ears, BOar head, cheetah body, and HEdgehog tail. The cheetah is represented by a ‘GE’ rather than ‘CH’ or ‘CHE’ and I have to assume that’s because it’s being used in another Whimling type.
This structure is deeply confusing, especially when the rules don’t seem to be uniform across the board. It’s why it can be really frustrating in trying to remember what combinations you need, because you can’t have two windows open. I ended up having to write down the combinations and color palette needed because I was driving myself crazy in trying to keep it all straight.
Truly, I sounded unhinged just constantly repeating, “DO-RA-RA-DE, DO-RA-RA-DE”. So, writing it down helped. Eventually, I noticed some helpful details that really changed the game for me and while I don’t remember them being mentioned in the tutorial, I really can’t promise that I just didn’t retain those helpful hints due to the infodump crowding my brain.
Tutorials are notoriously hard to balance. Not enough info leaves you lost, but too much info leaves you overwhelmed.
When you go to breed, there are filters that you can adjust in order to find animals with certain parts or color palettes. This was something I’d seen from the start, but it still wasn’t really helpful since you still needed to look everything up part by part. What you’re really looking for is to implement the ‘target’ system.
Above the requested Whimlings is a button that you can click and by doing so, it will show a green circle, red square, or blue triangle. By clicking those, you can sort your Whimlings in your inventory by one of those three categories. This will put the creatures that have the most features you’re looking for right at the top and makes it a lot easier to manage.
What is the most helpful and something I didn’t notice for hours, is that when you have the target system on, it will show icons next to the matching features. When I was breeding, I was constantly checking the parts on my list, but they were highlighted by the icons the whole time.
That means that if you’re paying attention to the icons, you can easily see the matching parts.
Maybe it’s just my addled brain that had a hard time struggling with this and it’s incredibly intuitive to other people. But, once I got the hang of the rules and developed a system, I had a lot more fun playing the game and feeling a bit like Frankenstein or Moreau by piecing together animals into the right fit.
From what I can tell, this is the core gameplay. You have an inventory tab to see your adopted pets, a collection tab to keep track of your areas and the parts you’ve found there, and an achievements tab that will give you crystals for completing things.
Watch the trailer for Whimside!
Overall, it’s fun despite it being a bit overwhelming at first with the various body parts, the naming scheme, and not being able to have multiple tabs open. And, unfortunately, tutorials are something that is hard to balance. If you’ve got a lot of information, even given succinctly, it can overload the player.
Whimside is a very fun creature collector and I enjoy the hunt of trying to get the right combinations. To me, it’s a bit more puzzle and chance than it is an idler. It needs too much active maintenance to really allow you to do other things at the same time. So, I wouldn’t suggest having it open if you need to heavily focus on something because Whimside needs so much attention.
Hell, there’s an upgrade that auto-collects crystals in the garden… except it doesn’t. I spent 1000 crystals for a button that auto-collects the crystals. Even that requires me to be involved.
Nothing progresses on its own except for the breeding and that’s just as the egg is forming. You still need to be the one to actively hatch it, leaving only a finite amount of time to actually idle. And, even then, that’s only if you’ve collected all the body parts and aren’t listening out for their spawn sound.
So, if you’re looking for a creature collector that needs you to be involved with some active waiting, Whimside will be a joy on your computer. But, if you’re hoping this is the idle game that it, frankly, misleads you to believe it is, you will want to skip it.
If you’d like to get Whimside, you can grab it for $5.85 over on Steam. Or, you can stay awhile and check out some of my other reviews, like MakeRoom or Bus Flipper: Renovator Simulator.
