Weyrdlets Seeks To Help Players Focus Through Interactive Digital Pet Care

I’ve been a busy lady these days. All good things, but for someone with the memory span of a bowl of cottage cheese, I need help remembering all the stuff I need to do. I’ve tried several strategies in the past: daily planners that sit unused on my desk until it’s the next year, a whiteboard on my wall that I detail colorfully and then forget to update for weeks, Post-its everywhere at my house, a Notes app on my phone full of scribblings, and more that I’m probably forgetting – remember, the bad memory thing?

And it’s people like me that Weyrdlets, a new idle pet game from Malaysian indie studio Weyrdworks, is trying to help with its cute pet-care-meets-productivity title. The game offers a handful of fantastical pets you can adopt and care for, providing the basics like food and attention they need to survive. There are plenty of ways for your pets to reward you with bonus boosts if they’re well cared for, and it’s then that the productivity aspect really comes into play.

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One of the biggest attractions of Weyrdlets is its desktop mode. Here, your pet can hang out on your PC, trotting around atop whatever programs you have open at any given time. They can locate treasures, go on adventures, or just hang out and keep you company. And along with these adorable desktop features for your pet itself comes a widget menu for you, offering a variety of tools to help you keep organized and focused. There are two settings in Weyrdlets worth highlighting: the Pomodoro Technique timer and the integrated to-do list.

If you’re not familiar, the Pomodoro Technique is a method meant to help people focus. You work on one task for between 15-25 minutes with a timer set, take a short break for less than five minutes, repeat a couple times, and then take a longer break before restarting the cycle from the beginning. I don’t personally find the Pomodoro Technique helpful, but if you’re someone who does, Weyrdlets offers an in-game widget to keep your timers.

What I do find myself loving, though, is Weyrdlets’ to-do list widget. Summer is convention season in the gaming industry, and I’m about to head out to four different events before autumn rolls around. I’ve spent the last week setting appointments, fielding emails, taking video meetings, doing research and writing interview questions, booking travel, and more, and that’s not to mention my regular daily workload on top of preparing for what’s to come. With my brain smoother than a baby’s bottom most of the time, I’ve needed a way to remember all the behind-the-scenes things I need to take care of. Weyrdlets gave me a to-do list on screen that I can’t ignore and a weird little guy who’s having his own adventures to hang out with while I check things off.

But you don’t have to be a busybody journalist to find use in the widgets – we all have daily tasks to complete. Whether you’re a remote employee trying to keep track of your laundry list of tasks, a student with assignments to keep straight, or just someone who could use a little organizational nudge in their lives, Weyrdlets is an intriguing new way to keep your head on a little straighter.

Even outside the utilitarian aspects of the game, Weyrdlets is downright charming. As I’m writing this, two pets are currently available – a rabbit-like critter called Mochi and a whale-crab creature called Wagyu. Gyoza, another Weyrdlet animal who resembles a cat, is on the way soon. You start off adopting only one of them, but you can accrue a whole crew once you’ve got the cash.

For those who remember the halcyon days of Tamagotchis – tiny digital pet keychains we used to bring around with us back in the late 1990s and early 2000s – Weyrdlets will feel delightfully familiar. Like our old virtual pet toys, Weyrdlets require care in the form of food, baths, medicine, and scooping their poop from off the beach. They can go on adventures and learn skills, making them a bit more advanced than the old favorite toy, but the bones of Weyrdlets feel remarkably familiar as someone who couldn’t be stopped from bringing her Tamagotchi everywhere as a child.

Weyrdlets feels like it was designed for people like me – burnt-out 30-somethings with more daily tasks than brain cells who need a hand remembering things. And if you’re targeting Millennials and trying to help us remember stuff, what better way to do that than to tie the maintenance and well-being of a virtual pet like the ones we loved when we were kids?

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