Aniimo’s art style and tamer-monster Twining may help it stand out in the creature collector genre, if monetization doesn’t get in the way

by

Okay, so I’m a huge fan of creature-collecting games, and it’s impossible to talk about them without mentioning Pokémon. Lately, though, things have been a little messy with games like Palworld facing legal trouble and Pickmon getting heat for designs that look a bit too familiar. That’s why I’m really interested in Aniimo, a new open-world RPG coming from Pawprint Studio – it’s another creature-capturing game, but it’s arriving at a tricky time.

The biggest question everyone’s asking is whether the creature designs are original, or if they just seem like copies of other popular monsters. A common criticism of similar games is that their creatures look too familiar. The demo at PAX East didn’t showcase many of the creatures – called aniimo – but the ones I did see seemed noticeably different from Pokémon.

Overall, the creatures in the demo looked really good! They felt well-developed and are generally quite cute, and it sounds like there will be a lot of different ones in the full game. While it’s early days, I can say that, based on what I’ve seen so far, none of the designs felt like blatant copies of other popular creatures like Pikachu.

The demo began with a character creation tool, which was decent but could definitely be better. It especially lacked diverse hairstyles and body types, and characters always looked overly polished. The rest of the demo at PAX gave me a good idea of what the full game will be like: you’ll be catching creatures, forming bonds with them – they call it ‘twining’ – and exploring the world.

The core of the game revolves around stealthily approaching creatures, optionally weakening them first, and then capturing them at the perfect time. While I’m trying not to draw too many comparisons to Pokémon, if you’ve played Pokémon Legends: Arceus or Pokémon Legends: Z-A, Aniimo’s action-based gameplay feels somewhat similar. Since the demo took place early in the game, capturing creatures was fairly straightforward, but I expect and hope that it will become more difficult and complex as you progress.

The game introduces a unique combat system where you directly control your companion, Twining, rather than giving it commands. During the demo, this felt a bit restricted and could benefit from more powerful attacks and options. However, it’s hard to fully judge how this system will feel within the complete game, as the demo served as both an introduction and a tutorial, potentially limiting its scope.

Right now, this feels like a really promising idea. If the developers can truly excel, Aniimo could become something special. If they succeed, it could be the unique feature that distinguishes Aniimo from other monster-collecting games and prevents people from simply comparing it to Pokémon Legends.

The game appears to heavily feature exploration, which is great – the vibrant graphics and beautiful environments in the demo suggest it will be a really enjoyable experience. I also saw footage of a campsite area where you can customize your own RV and visit friends in theirs, which could be another fun addition to the game.

The Animo demo shown at PAX was encouraging, though it still needs work in certain areas. Since the game will be free-to-play, it’s likely to include some kind of gacha mechanics, but hopefully these won’t detract from the game’s potentially strong core. There’s no firm release date yet, but with two closed betas already completed and the game looking quite polished, we probably won’t have to wait much longer to play it.

Aniimo is currently scheduled to release on Steam, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.

Read More

2026-04-09 08:26