Whimside mini review

With the success of Rusty’s Retirement, games that sit at the bottom of your screen have started popping up at an increasing rate. Their simple natures and generally low price points make them a no-brainer for people that want something they can progress through while spending time doing other things on the PC. Whimside tries to take the semi-afk nature of this “genre” and combine it with creature collecting. The result is something that only partially scratches the surface of what could be possible with this idea.

The aim of Whimside is to catch new whimlings, creatures that roam around in the world. Whimlings are made up of different parts, some rarer than others. You can then take two of these creatures and breed them to create a whimlings with the traits of its parents.

Outside of the opening, this guy basically just exists to drop a single line of text each biome.

Progression is handled via altars, each unlocking a new part of the map once you meet their requirements. Each altar sees you creating two specific whimlings, along with spending the crystals you generate by letting whimlings roam around in your garden.

Creating a whimling with the right traits is simple enough, as you can track which traits are needed for each altar. So you place two whimlings together with certain traits, wait until you get a child that has a combination of both, then repeat until all five traits are on one whimling. This often leads to some less-than-ethical inbreeding, making use of offspring to speed up breeding the perfect creature.

As a gameplay loop it works… alright, though there’s a lack of any depth or expanded mechanics as you make your way through the map. You reach a new biome, you catch a bunch of whimlings, then just breed them for the next few hours before proceeding.

Obviously Whimside is intended as a mostly afk experience, but later on it doesn’t even do that too well. As you start needing whimlings with rare or legendary traits, you have to keep an eye on the world in case they spawn. Later altar requirements also need you to mix and match creatures from different biomes, meaning you often need to breed 4-5 together at a bare minimum.

Whimlings barely differ between biome, hampering the collection aspect of Whimside.

While you can set notification noises and animation for specific triggers (such as a legendary trait appearing or eggs being ready to hatch), it’s still just slightly more micromanaging than I’d like. These games work when you can choose to mess with things for a bit and then leave the game running for a while. In Whimside, you have to check on things constantly if you want to make any real progress.

Progression is the main issue with Whimside, as there’s not much to unlock, and little to do outside of breeding new whimlings. There are a handful of upgrades to the garden and breeding grounds, but otherwise all you can do is decorate the garden. Whimlings don’t interact with objects — well, outside of walking into some of them — so there isn’t much joy in building up the garden or expanding it.

Even the actual whimlings aren’t fun to collect, something that doesn’t mesh well with a monster collecting game. They all run on four legs and act identically, even with legendary traits. It’s hard to care about the creatures running around at the bottom of the screen if the ones I’m getting at the end are barely different.

Whimside is an alright base for what could be something far more interesting. Increasing the variety of whimlings and adding more interactivity to the garden would already go a long way in making it feel more worthwhile. As it stands, there just isn’t much unless you want the absolute bare minimum from this type of game.

A review code for Whimside was provided by the publisher.

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