POCKETBEAST

Three buttons. That's the lot.

◀

Back one. Sends your beast left in the guessing game.

●

Do the thing. Also how you get back out of a screen.

▶

Forward one. Sends your beast right in the guessing game.

On a keyboard: ← Enter →. On a phone: your thumb. You can also just poke an icon.

Eight little pictures

• Feed — a proper meal fills the tank. A snack is pure joy and pure weight.
• Light — lights out once it nods off, or it sleeps badly and holds it against you.
• Play — five rounds of guess-which-way. Winning burns off the snacks.
• Medicine — for when it goes green around the gills. Sometimes takes two.
• Clean — it will make a mess. The mess will make it ill.
• Status — vital signs, weight, and your permanent record.
• Scold — for tantrums ONLY. Tell off a beast that genuinely needed you and it remembers.
• Alert — what it is yelling about right now.

It grows. You are being marked.

Egg, baby, child, teenager, grown-up. At every step the shell quietly totals up how you did — how well fed, how happy, how clean, how healthy — and takes a chunk off for every beep you let ring out.

Do well and it becomes something magnificent. Do badly and it becomes something that loves you anyway, resentfully, at a noticeably larger size.

Fair warning: a beast raised badly through its teens can never reach the very best ending, however hard you try afterwards. By the time you notice, it is done.

Fast clock, slow clock

Arcade runs in real time — a whole life in about half an hour, egg to headstone. Classic divides everything by twenty-four and turns the thing into a multi-day commitment, which is how these were originally inflicted on people.

Saved in this browser. Time still passes while the tab is shut, but only up to thirty arcade minutes' worth — so a weekend away earns you a furious beast, not a funeral.