Capture, nurture and breed cute creatures as you explore the whimsical world of Whimside.
The idle desktop game movement is now in full swing, a year on from Rusty’s Retirement we’re at a point where there are some serious choices to be made when it comes to what you have stuck (and running) on the bottom of your screen. Whimside is perhaps not as passive as some of its contemporaries, requiring a lot of intervention, however it’s a fun idea and delivered in an easy to understand way.
There’s a bit of a lurking danger when it comes to this modern interpretation of desktop pets, and it lays in exactly how much people choose to, or have to, interact with it — Ropuka’s Idle Island and Weyrdlets are almost entirely passive aside from aesthetic choices. The relatively recently released Idle Waters, much like the progenitor of the modern-movement Rusty’s Retirement, went down an incremental, almost RPG route instead, with unlocks based on interactions or upgrade purchases. Whimside takes it down a different route, and that’s by gating progression through breeding specific whimlings and through a currency earned through letting select ones graze.
In order to give you room to accomplish all of this you have access to a lot of extra menus. Your main map will show the wider-world, which you scroll along by holding right-click and sliding along the screen — you can also zoom in on this, but there’s not much of a reason to do this. There’s also a market area, a breeding area, and a grazing area. It does feel as though the grazing and breeding areas could have simply been strapped onto the sides of the market area, minimising the amount of clicking required in order to check for currency drops, buy upgrades and manage your breeding whimlings, but it’s not the end of the world. It simply means that you’ll never be able to catch new whimlings while you’re actively trying to stock up on the gems or breed the right whimling.
The reason you’ll need to breed whimlings, and probably spend a lot of time doing it, is because almost the entire progression and map unlock comes down to removing blockers that require specific ones. Each whimling is made up of five genetic traits — Colour, Head, Ears, Tail, Body — which each have their own rarity and area they generate in. They’re the main reason you’re here, of course, and they each have names that are portmantua-created by those components, so it all feels quite well thought out and implemented. The issue is, they spawn in slow — and odds are, well, odds. That’s where breeding comes in. You’ll place two whimlings in and they’ll have eggs that pick from the parents. This is also a bit of a coin-toss, and they won’t have eggs infinitely, so you’ll need to keep going back and clearing out the ones you don’t want.
This means that Whimside‘s entire progression hinges on selective breeding and patience, but… that you need to keep checking in if you want to proceed at any speed. And, that’s the rub here, it’s not really that much of an idle game… it’s instead just a desktop game that you’re probably going to run and interact with almost constantly while its open.
That’s not to take away from Whimside. It has a really fun genetics system and is great to look at, however, you will at times find (especially with quests) that sometimes you’ll breed whimling 1 and 2 to get two traits, then 3 and 4 to get a third train, 5 and 6 to get a fourth trait and then 7 and 8 to get 9, complete with all five traits… and you might find that that takes a very long time, even with multiple breeding areas.
I guess what I’m saying it, don’t expect Whimside to just sit there idly or automatically work towards progressing itself. But, were you really looking for it to play itself?
Whimside is available now for PC
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