Fantasy Friends
Xaloc Studios’ Fantasy Friends is a new kids’ game where you must look after all kinds of cute pets in a magical forest. Upon arrival at the forest, a fairy will explain what you need to do to take care of your new friends, from making them food to playing with them. Each time you interact with these pets you earn mana, that can be used to purchase new eggs to unlock more pets, or can be used to buy customisation items.
I recruited the help of our five-year-old daughter as she was over the moon to see this installed on our Switch. It’s a very straightforward, simple game - and one that can be played through fairly quickly, with all creatures being hatched in a short space of time. But this isn’t where the game ends, you can continue to care for these friends, naming them all and personalising them to make all of the inhabitants of the forest look how you desire.
The art direction is cute, with tonnes of baby-pinks and bright, happy colours and the forest itself just oozes childlike wonder. There are twelve creatures available that can be hatched from eggs and taken care of. Each of these adorable pets has a wide variety of skins and colours to unlock so that you can customise them, and you can do this further by adding accessories such as hats to give them a cool new look. Looking after your friends will require you to keep them fed, cleaned and played with - with you being able to play fetch to keep them entertained. It’s a perfectly engaging game for kids, and our little girl has not wanted to stop playing it, as making sure all of the pets were happy and fed kept her totally captivated.
Each of the pets has two forms - three if you want to include their pre-hatched egg form - and by continuing to shower your companions love and attention, they’ll evolve from their baby stage into a larger version. Eva loved this, and easily bonded with all of these ‘pets’. She even drew pictures of them all at one point whilst the Switch had to charge, as she was just so in love with them all.
Controls are straightforward, and most things can be done with either the joycons/controller or by touching the screen if in handheld mode. It’s such a simple premise, and whilst there are a bunch of different things you can do with your pets, as well as decorating your forest with unlockable decorations these are well explained and easy enough to do.
At £24.99 on the Nintendo eShop, at first it feels like it’s quite an expensive title for what it has to offer - but it has actually provided hours upon hours of fun for our daughter, who has barely stopped playing it since we got it to review. It’s obviously a game aimed at kids, and it definitely kept ours entertained.
In the end, we decided to give Fantasy Friends the Collecting Asylum rating of 7.5/10.
Have you played Fantasy Friends yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to Just For Games for the Fantasy Friends Nintendo Switch review code!
