From a young age, I have been enamored with a type of game that I call "creature breeding games". These games have creatures that you can collect and care for - this is usually the main focus of the game, but it can also be a side mechanic. These creatures can be bred, and their offspring will inherit a mix of traits that affect their appearance and not just be a carbon copy of either parent. (Games with genetics that only affect stats don't interest me at all, so things like Pokemon are out.) A game can stay completely true to real-life animal genetics, invent its own off-the-wall fantasy genetics system, or find a happy medium in between. My love for these games was my first introduction to animal genetics, which is now one of my biggest special interests. Here I will talk about the creature breeding games I have played and enjoyed the most, ordered chronologically by when I first played them.
Petz Catz Clan + Dogz Pack
Petz Catz Clan and Dogz Pack were released for the Nintendo DS in 2008. I picked them out at the store when I was very young, and they were my first foray into this niche genre.
They are more or less the same game, except one features cats and the other features dogs (kind of like Pokemon versions). You can adopt, raise and care for them. You feed them, play with them, and take them to places they can run around and have fun, like the park or the beach.
Of course I enjoyed just taking care of my pets, but I was completely blown away when I discovered they could have babies and the babies wouldn't look exactly like the parents. I began spending most of my time breeding my pets, which is done by having a male and female pet hang out in a park together until they start circling around each other with hearts appearing. I would keep breeding them until I reached the maximum number of pets I could have (which I think was somewhere between 8 and 12) and then I would delete my save file and start again.
(This screen is very nostalgic for me!)
I just thought it was the most fun thing in the world seeing what kinds of unique babies my pets could have. My parents didn't understand it. I love these games a lot, and I sometimes listen to the soundtrack while I work on this site. The time I got into these games was when we were moving into a new house, which was scary for me, but a big part of how I got through it was by playing these games for hours. Looking back, there is a surprising amount of depth to these considering they are virtual pet games for the DS.
The Sims is a series of life simulation games where you create a family, build them a house, and watch their lives play out. There are also expansions to each The Sims game that add pets, namely cats and dogs. They have their own goals, aspirations, and personalities, just like the people do.
I guess I've never really played The Sims the way it's "supposed" to be played. As a kid when I was introduced to The Sims 2 Pets, I was a lot more focused on the pets than the people. With my first family, I kind of just hastily put together a person or two and then focused on making unique-looking dogs. There was a limited color palette to choose from, but I still had fun with it. I remember one of the dogs being red.
Since The Sims is about the lives of unique people and animals, of course there is a genetics system and no two people or animals will look the same. This became my new Dogz Pack as I continuously bred dogs to see what kind of cool puppies I could get. I had a ton of fun with it, although I eventually started breeding dogs and then letting their need fulfillment bars go down so they would run away and I could have other families adopt them. I was running a puppy mill out of the PlayStation 2. I don't really know what I was thinking there.
I eventually got The Sims 3 Pets, and I spent far more time playing it than The Sims 2 Pets. I liked it more because it has better graphics, many more options for customizing the people and animals you make, an open world instead of loading between areas, and horses.
The PC version also had mods I could install to add more custom markings for animals and remove the animal limit per household, so I could create the perfect family - a self-insert, a fictional character I had a crush on, 8 cats, 12 dogs, and 20 horses. I got so many animals that their icons would flood the screen and my game would crash.
There are far more unique possibilites for animal appearances in The Sims 3 Pets than The Sims 2 Pets, so I had a lot more fun with the animal breeding in this game. I remember crossbreeding my two favorite dog breeds a lot (Dalmatians and German Shepherds). I always got adorable brown puppies with patches of white spotted areas. Not realistic, but really cute. I also remember creating my own dog breed based on a clickbait news headline I was briefly obsessed with where someone caught a mangy brown dog in a trap and claimed it was a Chupacabra.
I have tons of fun memories of breeding the animals in this game - both realistic-looking ones and fantasy ones, like rainbow-colored unicorns. I still come back to it from time to time.
The Sims 4 never really clicked with me - I like some new stuff like more gender options for people and an even deeper genetics system, but with great features like the open world being removed and DLC costing an absurd amount, to me it feels like a soulless cash grab. However, I do love these pet crossbreeding videos by Seri! Pixel Biologist on YouTube. Click the image to check them out if you want!
Mobile Games
I got my first iPod probably around the same time I was playing The Sims 3, so of course I looked for more of this kind of game. There were a lot of games where you could breed animals to get rare specified variants, but there were few that actually had traits that could be combined. (If you've watched the fake ad marquees on my homepage, you'll recognize these!...They're all defunct. I miss them.)
Dream Zoo was awesome. It was one of the first mobile games I played and I fell in love with it. You could go on safaris to gather animals for your zoo and breed them to work your way up rarity tiers, the last of which was all rainbow animals. Each animal looked unique, and each animal family lived on a square of habitat. You could put squares of the same habitat next to each other and the animals would wander through all of them! There was also an AR feature to take pictures of your animals in real life.
The company shut it down in 2013 to save money and I was absolutely devastated. Sadly, this is a risk you take with any online-only game. Many of the mobile games I loved as a child are no longer available for download, no longer work, or the servers have been shut down. But hey, I remember them, and they were really cool, and now I can tell you about them!
Derby Days was a really cool game where you can raise foals into adult horses, train them, and race them. You can also customize your ranch with many decorations. The horses can look realistic or have fantasy traits like horns and wings. One of my favorite horses was called Comet, and he was a dark brown horse with golden antlers and a golden bunny tail.
What's unique about this game's breeding system is that it's interactive! Say you go to a friend's ranch and you see a horse you think looks awesome. You can send a request to breed their horse with yours and get a foal! I usually ended up sending breeding requests to the horses on the NPC ranch you're automatically friends with (pictured above), but I think I also bred with random people's horses a couple times, and there were also limited time studs that would cycle out.
I miss this game a lot. I remember really liking the music, and I also remember a time I begged my parents to let me spend like $5-$10 on in-app purchases so I could get rare horses. I don't think I've seen any other fantasy horse breeding games.
Strangelings was a game where you can breed fox-like creatures called Strangelings. They have hidden traits that are revealed as they age. They come in a multitude of colors, sport interesting markings, and can have horns, wings, hair, different tails, etc. They apparently got their start as "breedables" on Second Life (which I should maybe check out eventually, but it's honestly intimidating. Plus all I know about it is from the Monster Factory "Boy-Mayor" series).
This game has more of a basis on real genetics and likely introduced me to terms like "dominant" and "recessive". One thing I really liked about it is that you can watch the Strangelings walk around in a 3d environment - I always found that more fun than, for example, browser-based games where animals are static images.
This game was a lot of fun and I miss it. I probably played it the least out of these three games, and I'm not sure why I didn't play it more considering how cool it was.
Browser Games
I got very into browser-based pet games as a kid and signed up for a lot of them. (I was breaking the rules because I was under the minimum age for all of them, but nobody ever found out, so oh well.) I had a lot of fun with them, even though they're not as fun to me now as an adult. Of course I'm only going over the ones I consider creature breeding games here (and only the ones I've spent a considerable amount of time on), but I've probably played at least 30 different browser-based pet sim games, some just for a day and some for months or years.
My parents got me a Facebook account with a fake name when I was young so I could play the games, and this was a favorite of mine. The objective is to raise and breed Ovipets, various creatures that hatch from eggs. They can be absolutely any color, and I remember people going nuts over "pures" (hex codes like #ffffff, #fff000, and so on). I usually just picked out whatever pets I thought were coolest from the adoption center.
You can also tend to other people's eggs, which earns you points that can be used to unlock new traits for creatures you grow in your laboratory.
Happy Pets is another Facebook game. Unlike Ovipets, the animals are not static images and they move around in rooms that you can freely decorate. I was completely amazed by the breeding mechanics in this game. I tested them out first by breeding my black dog and my white dog, expecting a clone of either one but maybe with the eye colors swapped. I was so surprised when I got a light gray puppy, a dark gray puppy, and an almost black puppy! There are many different cool pets to obtain in this game. Some of them can be huge or tiny while some can have a glowing aura around them, and these traits pass down. They can come in any color at all and there are limitless possibilites. Look at this giant cat and these griffins!
This game shut down in late 2021, and I miss it terribly and feel like I took it for granted. I've never seen another game like it. Even though I remember getting bored with the freemium nature of the game and uh, "definitely not cheating" to get more coins, it was still a really cool and unique pet sim.
Mweor is a game where you raise and breed cats. They come in a few different species, many of which are based on elements. You can gain new cats by sending one of yours out on an expedition in a game where you can move them around. You find them and have an opportunity to claim them.
This is one of my cats, named Crookedmask. (Most of my cats have warrior cat names that came from a generator...some top-tier names in there like "Meltingbird".) On top of the exploring to find new cats, I really like that when your cats get too old, they don't die. Instead, they "retire" and can't breed any more.
In Wolfplay, you manage a pack of wolves. You have an alpha pair and the rest of the pack, and you have to explore and hunt for food. The alpha pair are the only wolves who can breed within the pack (my alpha wolves were an early iteration of my previous fursona and Jacob from Twilight, but let's not talk about that). The game is mostly based in realism, but there are many cool fantasy markings your wolves can have.
I remember really liking how you can hunt food and bury it to store it, and it always felt great when my wolves managed to take down something big like a deer that could feed them for a long time. I kept a detailed log of everything my wolves found on a writing website that has now been lost to time (called something silly like wrib or skrib?). I also got really mad when I put one of my wolves' offspring up for sale for one unit of in-game currency as a nice thing for someone, and one of the admins bought her and deleted her from the game. They had a big long thing in their bio about how it was their job to keep the game servers clean and people shouldn't get mad at them, but they killed my real actual daughter, so I wasn't having any of that. I made it my pack's mission to rescue wolves that were up for sale for cheap before something like that could happen to them.
Lioden is a game where you play as a male lion, expand your territory, gather a pride of lionesses, and have cubs. You can explore the world to find food, lionesses, and decorative items, and you unlock more areas as your king wins fights with other animals and levels up. You can also raise your impression level, which makes it easier to impress lionesses.
There are limitless options for the appearance of a lion. Rather than any color hex code being possible like on some other animal sim games, there are specific colors that are hand-designed, and new ones are added on a regular basis. Each lion can have up to ten markings, ranging from extremely common to extremely rare, and they can vary in opacity. You are not limited to breeding between your king and your lionesses - you can pay to send stud requests to other people's kings.
Lioden is my favorite browser-based game of all time. If you're going to play one of these online animal sim games, play Lioden. (As long as you're okay with suggestive content and some gory drawings. If you're fine watching nature documentaries then you should be fine playing this.) It's the only one of these games I have enjoyed consistently over the years (even though I started playing it when I was way under the age limit of 16, lol). It never gets old because there are monthly events - they are the same every year, but each time there are new hot-ticket items you can buy from the event shops, such as new markings and decorations. These events usually revolve around exploring, which is a ton of fun to do and keeps the game fresh. There are also games to play to earn currency, and many fun side tasks like raising beetles to fight one another. You can play casually and try to have a realistic lion pride, or you can set out to breed for rare markings and mutations.
Really, there's so much you can do in this game. You can also accumulate a hoard of decorations, accessories, and backgrounds for your lions. You don't even have to have a king - there is an item that changes what sex your lion appears as, so you can have a queen! When your favorite lions die, you can memorialize them, so you can look back and see generations of your lions. There's just a ton of depth to this game, and I honestly really want to play it now lol. The best part is your lions only age and get hungrier when you log in and "roll over", so you can take a break for years and come back with everything just as you left it!
Felisfire is a game where you play as a scientist studying cat-like aliens called xenofelinoids. You collect and breed them, and they can come in any color. Xenofelinoids have a third sex called "omni" which can breed with any sex, so it's fun when you get an omni with markings you would really like to pass down.
I got into this game in 2018 (everything before this was in like 2013-14) with my friend Assiel (go check out their site!) and had a lot of fun with it. You can cryogenically freeze cats indefinitely and you have a lot of storage, so you can accumulate cats quickly and breed a lot of them. I remember one of my first cats being called Bowling Alley Carpet.
Furry Paws is a game where you breed and train dogs. It is based entirely in realism, and there are many different dog breeds. They use real genetics, and there is a minigame that teaches you about dog genetics (which I played a lot, but have forgotten a lot of).
I got into this game in late 2019 while looking for something to do online that wasn't Tumblr. I ended up not really focusing on the breeding and mostly just bought dogs that didn't have their needs taken care of. I had my own dog rescue, and I took care of the dogs every day. However, as the year went on I got more and more involved in extracurriculars, and it got to the point where there were some days I was coming home from school at 7 P.M. and spending an hour mindlessly feeding and grooming virtual dogs (lots of clicking and hurting my hand), so I stopped.
Xanje is a fantasy game with a huge focus on collecting an unlimited number of pets. You leave a page open in a field, and when you hear rustling, you can go to the tab and there will be a creature you can click to claim. There are dozens of different species, each with several pattern variants, and they can be any color at all. You can also breed them, but you have to use special items.
I got into this game at the very end of 2019 while looking for a pet game that wouldn't become a job like Furry Paws did. I ended up really enjoying just collecting hundreds of animals and watching them grow up. I have only bred them a couple of times since the items are hard to come by. It's one of the online pet games I enjoy the most today.
Minecraft isn't a creature breeding game, but with the right mods, you can turn it into one! I have already gone over these mods in my Minecraft shrine, but I will go over them here too.
Genetic Animals replaces all of vanilla Minecraft's animals, which normally just come in one variant, which genetic versions that have true-to-life genetics and more realistic models. It currently affects llamas, rabbits, sheep, pigs, chickens, cows, Mooshrooms, turtles, and axolotls. There are plans for all of Minecraft's other animals and for each animal to have its own personality.
(I took this screenshot! Look at all those chickens!)
This is one of my favorite Minecraft mods. My preferred way to play Minecraft is to explore, gather cool things and animals, build, and just chill. Finding interesting animals on expeditions, bringing them home and breeding them for fun new combinations makes the game a ton of fun for me. I'm very excited for dogs to be added! I honestly also think it would be really cool if the developers of this mod made their own animal genetics breeding/farming game that was separate from Minecraft.
Realistic Horse Genetics
Realistic Horse Genetics is similar to Genetic Animals, but it only affects horses and donkeys. It gives them realistic genetics including size variation. I find it fun to use because I always tame a horse to ride around on in a new Minecraft world, and now each horse can really be unique. Vanilla Minecraft horses have a genetics system, but it is very basic. I do wish the horses in this mod could have different body shapes though.
Simply Cats
Simply Cats adds realistic genetics and a new model to Minecraft's cats. It also adds placeable items like food dishes and litterboxes. I like this mod a lot because the new cat models are very cute. However, you can only find cats in animal shelter buildings in villages, and not all villages even have them. I wish the cats would spawn naturally in the wild.
WildCraft
Wildcraft adds realistic genetics to Minecraft's wolves. The ones you find out in the wild usually only have wolf-like appearances, and you can breed them for colors and markings more typical of dogs. It has not been updated in a long time, but I still really enjoy it and am excited to see how it develops in the future.
ARK: Survival Evolved is a game where you are dropped onto an island crawling with dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. You have no food, clothes, or supplies, and your objective is to build a base, tame animals, and survive. Creature breeding is clearly not the focus of this game, but each animal has one of several possible natural colors assigned to each of its "color regions" (such as head, back, or underbelly) and they can be bred with the offspring having a mix of its parents' colors. What's really intriguing is the game's mutation system - each baby has the chance of having a mutation applied to one of its color regions, giving it a color that may not be possible for the species. These are often unnatural and bright colors, and mutations are accompanied by a stat boost.
Depending on the game settings of the server you play on, it may take real life hours for an egg to hatch or for a mammal to give birth. Babies cannot eat from food troughs like adult animals, so they need to be hand-fed within minutes of their birth or they will die. Breeding in this game is challenging, but for me it was worth it to ride a prized neon-colored dinosaur into battle. The first animals I ever bred were direwolves, and I remember the gestation period being an hour and a half, so when I came home from school and logged onto ARK, I would have to time the breedings carefully so I wouldn't be doing something else like eating dinner or doing homework when the baby was born. I remember my first mutant - a direwolf with a bright red back.
I have had tons of fun with the breeding in this game. Since there are many ARK servers you can play on, you can join a breeding community and trade mutant animals with one another. I remember setting up a hyaenodon breeding building with my friend on a server, and we ended up with dozens of cool neon-colored hyaenodons. It was always a really exciting moment when an animal is born and you spot a new awesome color on it, and it was especially exciting getting twins or triplets with mutations.
Niche is a turn-based strategy survival game with the goal of breeding a race of creatures that can survive effectively in their environment by having the right adaptations. For example, if you go to a swamp island, you may want to breed for creatures that are immune to the poisonous berries that grow there.
I fell in love with this game when I discovered it in 2017 and put dozens of hours into it. I had tons of fun seeing what kind of creatures I could get by breeding them. Spots and stripes on creatures used to be only one pattern and color, and I remember being extremely hyped when procedurally generated patterns and variations in the color and shape of patterns were being added.
As fun as the breeding in this game is, the gameplay itself is honestly pretty boring and repetitive. I liked it more when I was younger because I could imagine scenarios and personalities for my animals, but now I see that it's a lot of just clicking to harvest berries. The most effective strategy is to play it safe and stay on one island until you can breed a race of super generalist creatures with powerful horns and different kinds of paws, which is really boring. Plus, all the clicking really hurts after a while. Maybe this would be more fun on a console? I bought the Switch version for a few dollars but have yet to try it out.
Petz 5
Before Ubisoft acquired Petz and began developing console games like Catz Clan and Dogz Pack, Petz was a series of computer games focused on raising virtual pets. They are made up entirely of balls and a few lines, which makes their appearance and animations unique. There are a few breeds of dogs and cats you can adopt from the adoption center, and once they grow up, you can breed them and create unique mixed breed pets.
I got into this game in early-mid 2019 when I got myself a copy of Petz 5. The breeding system in this game allows for a lot of fun combinations, but what really drew me to these games is the community aspect and the sheer amount of custom content. People can customize just about everything in the game and make their own breeds, individual pets, playscenes, toys, and much more. Since these games came out in the late 90s and early 00s, there has been a community surrounding them for decades, and for good reason - they are truly unique. Here are just a few of the custom (hexed) individual pets I have adopted from other people! You can click them to see their individual pages (or click here to see my Petz homepage):
(at the time of writing I'm 2/3 of the way done with my Petz pages, so some of these links may not work yet)
And here are a few of my favorite custom breeds!
ShelterDogz and Moggies from Vickie's Petz Zoo
These breeds have hundreds of billions of possibilities! Adopting one from the adoption center is meant to replicate the experience of bringing home a stray animal.
Lovebirdz from [BAD_DEATH]
[BAD_DEATH] makes some really cool-looking hexes, and this is one of my favorite breeds by them! (They also made the red Grookey pictured earlier!) It's a really cool and unique-looking animal.
Spamton NEO from Dib's Laboratory
Honestly obsessed with this guy. I adopted one and he prances around like he owns the place. The most creature I've ever seen. One of the beasts ever.
If you found any of this interesting, you should check out Petz! Seriously it's such a cool old game! People even pose their animals and participate in/judge shows! It's so fun!
Horse Isle 3: Infinite Wilds is an MMO where you catch wild horses, breed them, have them participate in obstacle courses, and build your own ranch. There is a massive open world with many biomes that initially gives the impression that it is infinite and procedurally generated like Minecraft. The horse genetics system is very in-depth and based on real horse genetics, and there are endless appearances your horse can have.
I got into this game in June of 2020 as I had more free time than I had since I was a little kid and I was desperate for things to do. I was honestly drawn to it because of how old and a little janky it looks. It reminds me of playing FeralHeart as a kid and makes me feel nostalgic. (FeralHeart is an old wolf/lion furry MMO...though it's really more of a 3D chatroom as there's nothing else to do but make a character and talk to people.) My routine for a little while was get up, eat breakfast, play with my cat for a while, and get on Horse Isle 3. My favorite horse was a short reddish-brown horse with a black mane called Cappy. I had some good fun with it, running around lassoing and breeding horses and exploring the huge world looking for Mario-esque question mark blocks that would give you currency if you answered a question right. I ultimately got bored of it after a couple weeks though - I never liked MMOs that much.
Wobbledogs is a sandbox game focused on raising and breeding dog-like alien creatures. You can feed them, play with them, pet them, and pick them up and toss them around (they'll be fine). You can customize the network of pens they live in with unlockable wallpapers and furniture. Their animations are entirely physics-based, and they are called Wobbledogs because of how they wobble around when they move.
The breeding system in this game is very unique. You can spawn as many "default dogs" as you want from a dog egg incubator (your standard four-legged dogs with a pink and blue body) and you occasionally get special dogs from meeting goals. You select two dogs and then enter the breeding simulation, where a group of the dogs' potential offspring are created, and you select two of them to breed. You keep going until you have a dog you are happy with or the simulation becomes unstable and gives you a litter of just one dog.
The further you go in the simulation, the more likely you are to get unusual mutations, like vastly different colors, patterns, wings, horns, and more/less legs. You can get really wild with the shapes of dogs you produce, but it is wise to be careful as you may end up with a dog that has front legs way shorter than its back legs and can't walk around. When you're done, you inject the resulting dog's genes into an egg and hatch it. Dogs continue to mutate as they grow based on their "gut flora", which are bacteria in their guts they get from eating different foods.
I have been following this game's development since 2017, and it finally released in 2021. I was drawn to it because it felt like it was made just for me. I love the cartoony/toy-like artstyle and colorful aesthetic, the concept of the game, and the focus on breeding wacky-looking dogs and just watching them wobble around and interact with one another. I have put dozens of hours into it already. Pet simulation games are a very niche genre, and I honestly think Wobbledogs is the best modern pet sim out there.
It even helps to maintain the community/sharing aspect that I love in old games like Petz, as you can copy a dog's genetic code and send it to a friend or post it online, and other people can put a clone of the dog into their game. I also love the focus on freedom and creativity - there is no currency to earn, and all unlocks are achieved through goals (like having dogs dig x amount of holes, or breeding a very long dog) or through opening prize capsules that your dogs produce.
Creatures is a series of artificial life simulation games from the mid-late 90s and early 00s. There are alien creatures called Norns that you can hatch from eggs, and it is up to you to teach them the meanings of words and which things in their environment are safe to interact with so they can survive. They will grow up, have babies, and pass on their knowledge. You can eventually have a self-sustaining population of Norns, and some will be born with mutations, meaning your population could eventually look vastly different from the default Norns you start with.
I found out about this series because Tom Astle, the developer of Wobbledogs, cited it as an inspiration for the game. There is an incredible amount of depth to it - the creatures can communicate with you and with one another using the words they learn, and every aspect of a creature's brain is simulated. I have only really scratched the surface of it and played for a few hours (it's a little complicated and overwhelming at times), but it's extremely cool. As with Petz, there is a breadth of custom content such as new breeds of Norn, objects for them to interact with, custom maps, and gameplay alterations. These games recently (in 2021/2022) got a Steam port, which fixes some bugs and makes them much more compatible with modern computers.
Of Interest
Here I will talk about some creature breeding games I am interested in, but haven't played yet. Most are games that will come out in the future!
Mewgenics is a game where you collect and breed cats and then have them fight in turn-based battles. It has been in development for a very long time (since 2013!), but it is slated to release in 2024 or 2025. It's a roguelike and probably contains some gross-out humor, which are things I am not jazzed about. However, I have been following this game since development started (when I was a kid lol) and had a brief period in 2013 where I was obsessed with it and read articles about it/devlogs over and over again. I was so excited for it to come out...yeah. I'm still going to play it I think, even though it's not completely focused on cat breeding like it initially seemed to be. Here is a screenshot from 2013, of a house full of cats:
And here is a screenshot from recently, of a battle:
Pretty different, as you can see.
Horribunnies is a game where you raise and breed rabbits. You can breed rabbits with specific traits to fulfill orders from people who want to buy them. There is also a dark route you can take where you raise bunnies for meat and genetically modify them, but I'm not going to do that because that would make me feel bad.
I played the demo for this on Steam and thought it was pretty interesting! I'm looking forward to playing the full game when it comes out. It reminds me of an animal shelter flash game I used to play a lot when I was a kid. The release date is TBD.
Poglings is an upcoming game where you raise and breed creatures called Poglings as well as have them compete in races. You can also explore the island you live on, upgrade your Pogling nest, and catch bugs and fish.
I'm very excited for this game! I'm subscribed to Chadtronic on YouTube (but haven't really watched his videos in a long time), and on a whim I clicked a video he uploaded called something like "I've kept this secret for five years". Imagine my surprise when it was an annoucement that he was making this really cool game! It's going to have a Kickstarter, and I'm usually very wary about Kickstarter games, but I'm definitely backing this. (They have promised there are no NFT/crypto/blockchain elements, which I'm glad about.) The Poglings are such cute little guys! This game is heavily inspired by the Chao Garden in Sonic Adventure 2 (something I have thought about checking out, but I'm not a big fan of Sonic games).
Webkinz Next began in 2020. It is a successor to the original Webkinz (now called Webkinz Classic - don't worry, it's still playable and being maintained with new content) and features 3D pets instead of the traditional 2D. I have mixed feelings about Webkinz Next as a whole - they have steered away from plushies, which are a big part of the Webkinz experience for me, and the new Webkinz Next plushies don't really stand out to me at all. They don't have the Webkinz personality in my opinion - they look a bit like off-brand Beanie Boos. Plus, the 3D graphics just don't have the charm of the 2D graphics for me. However, I still want to check this game out eventually because of the breeding system.
Each Webkinz has three "sparks", and you can combine two sparks to produce a baby, which will have three of its own sparks once it grows up. It uses a fun fantasy genetics system, and babies will have different rarities based on the traits they acquire. I would have gone nuts over this as a kid! I loved making up stories about my Webkinz and definitely envisioned some as couples - specifically my boy skunk, Skunky (creative, I know) and my girl fox, Tails (I was really into Sonic for a while when I was little). I would have loved for them to be able to have babies! It seems like you can get some really fun and interesting combinations and rare fur patterns.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read my thoughts on this niche game genre I love! I hope you had fun/learned something new! If you discovered a game from this page that you think looks fun, I encourage you to check it out and tell me what you think! (And please let me know if something is hard to read! I struggled a bit in contrasting the font colors with the backgrounds.)
