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7.3 excellent
One evening a few winters ago, I found a box of kittens by the side of the road about a mile south of Kagohara Station in Saitama, Japan. Children had drawn pictures of cat faces and written messages in marker on the box, as well as in chalk on the road. "We are cute kittens without a home, please help us." (There was also a drawing of a bunny face, but no bunnies in the box.) It was obvious the four newborn kittens wouldn't survive the night.
It also seemed obvious that the kids' parents had involved them in dumping the kittens by encouraging them to draw cute pictures on the box. What kind of parents would teach their children that kind of lesson? I transferred the kittens to another box with a fluffy towel for bedding, then I wrote my own message next to the children's on the original box. "The kittens froze to death during the night and were buried. You killed them." I replaced this box by the side of the road. That's what I call "street parenting." The next morning I took the kittens to a local veterinarian who agreed to care for them and find them a home with one of his customers.
Grimm's Hatchery, by Amaranth Games, is a game about raising magical livestock (referred to as "pets"). Your evil step-brother Lord Boras has inherited the Kingdom of Candar from your super evil step-father, Lord Dredmond. However your step-father put a loophole in his will just for kicks: if you can amass 300,000 gold coins in 70 days, you can buy the title to the kingdom. You decide to do just that, and set out to make money the only way you know how: by raising and breeding magical animals!
You start out in ramshackle, run-down Grimm's Farm on the outskirts of the poor part of town, called the Backlands. Luckily the destitute townsfolk can sell you pets, pet food (i.e. grain), medicine, weapons, etc. As your wealth increases, you'll be able to buy and raise more valuable pets and unlock fancier neighborhoods and hatcheries. (There are four hatcheries in total.)
Basic gameplay involves exercising your mouse button as you watch your pet waddle randomly around the farmyard for the length of a game day (about thirty seconds). Sometimes a pet will lay an egg, which you can click on to scoop up. Sometimes a pet will get hungry for apples, and you can click on it to feed it some grain. (You'll soon notice that all your pets want apples... but all you can give them is grain. That's hilarious.) Be careful, because if a pet goes hungry for too long, it will die. Sometimes a monster will enter the hatchery from a hole in the fence at the bottom right of the screen, and you must click on it repeatedly until it dies. If a monster bites a pet, the pet can be injured or poisoned, and will probably die unless you've bought a supply of medicine. (Later in the game, you can get a watchdog-type pet to automatically attack monsters.)
At the end of the day, any eggs you haven't collected are lost and any pets who are sick or starving are healed. This is pretty unrealistic, even for a game about the magical livestock business, and is probably the game's biggest and most annoying fault.
After each day you can sell the eggs your pets laid, or try to hatch them. Only about one in ten seem to hatch, however, so it's better just to sell them and use the profits to buy new pets. Soon you'll have a handful of pets running around your farmyard, laying eggs, asking for apples, and attracting monsters. By the way, no matter how hard you try or where you click, you can't repair the hole in the southeast fence. Monsters are going to get in.
Every now and then a pet will lay a special crystal egg. (The next time I run into a veterinarian I'll ask how this works.) There are different colors of crystal eggs - some good, some bad. All have special magical effects. For example, red eggs feed all your hungry pets. Yellow eggs cause all your pets to lay an egg. Green eggs poison some of your pets. Black eggs kill some of your pets. Grimm's Hatchery will definitely school you on oology. Did you know that Gryphonette eggs pop out with bows tied around them? I didn't. Plus, sometimes geese lay golden eggs, which are worth more money, and can be hatched into golden geese. Sometimes golden geese lay magic eggs, which can be hatched into magical geese. Once you unlock Greenwich Square, you'll find a man standing in the street who is able to combine pet eggs and make new, unique pets.
If you talk to the right townsperson, you can have a magical tractor built that will collect eggs for you.
The animals you raise may be called your pets, but you can't interact with them in any way besides clicking on them to feed them grain or medicine. Neither do they interact with each other. (I would love to see them chase each other or play-fight, but no such luck.) They also die easily once you get about eight or ten of them in a hatchery, because it's not simple to give out grain while collecting eggs and beating off monsters. The real focus of the game is earning gold to buy more expensive pets, to produce more expensive eggs, to get more gold, etc.
The graphics are simple and folksy and the music sounds appropriately old-fashioned, like a midi file from the 1700s or a music box, though it sometimes has a bit of static. Despite the total lack of pet interaction in Grimm's Hatchery and its click click clickety click gameplay, it is a fun experience. If you enjoy the free trial, you'll enjoy the full version. Give it a try.