Drawing 600 of anything sounds like a lot. Drawing 600 creatures, and then programming the thing they live in, is what Goca, the solo developer behind Goca Games, has done with Momolitos, and I’d like to think there’s a sketchbook somewhere that’s just eyes and tails.

Momolitos launches on iOS this week, alongside Switch and Steam, and what you feed your creatures decides what they turn into. You start with an egg, raise whatever hatches, and head out into a handful of colourful worlds looking for ingredients. Bring them back, try a new food, see what happens. Some forms are cute, others apparently go somewhere much stranger.

Home base is MomoLAB, a slightly ominous lab where you look after everything, log what you’ve discovered and get ready for the next trip out. The worlds have puzzles and mini-games tucked in between the foraging, plus the odd secret if you go looking.

Feeding-based evolution isn’t new. Digimon tied its evolutions to how well you looked after your monster back on the PS1, and I’d argue that’s still more interesting than evolving the second you hit a certain level. What Momolitos is betting on is keeping the routes hidden, so working them out is the fun. 

The trouble is that creature collectors tend to get solved fast, with every path on a wiki before most people have hatched their second egg. A one-person release probably won’t get picked apart quite that quickly, and that might work in its favour. If ingredients are easy enough to find that experimenting doesn’t turn into a grind, I’d happily go in blind.

Source link