I never felt that the initial trailers for Aniimo did a great job explaining what the game was. There were a lot of cute creatures thrown together in pre-rendered scenes and signs of a grand adventure to go on, but it all felt a little too vague. Now, having played it, I can understand why it was so vague, and it’s not for good reasons. (Especially after the developer admitted on Reddit that it created and later pulled genAI ads in July 2026.)
Aniimo is a creature-capturing action RPG set in an open world. You are a researcher for the Polaris Institute tasked with heading around the country to study, capture, and befriend the titular creatures. This is done while investigating strange Aniimo-related phenomena such as the mysterious Prismana Flow and uncovering the mysteries behind ruins scattered across the landscape.
While there is an obvious comparison to Pokemon to make, it’s also easy to see a lot of Palworld here. A big open world, base building mechanics, an abundance of Temu Pokemon casually wandering about, and a barely-there a story all feel very much like Pocketpair’s big hit. But while Palworld leaned heavily into being Ark with animal sweatshops, Aniimo goes for a cozier vibe.
Aniimo’s main draw is that you can “twine” with your lil buddies and control them directly, allowing you to make use of their unique abilities. For instance, squirrel-like Aniimo can climb and glide, while water types can swim in deep water. Unfortunately in practice, a lot about this that falls flat. Those unique abilities are a significant problem at times, with the traversal abilities often feeling clunky and unintuitive. The battle system involves mainly mashing attack until you can throw out your big-hitting moves. Worst of all, progression is probably some of the worst I’ve ever seen in a game like this.
The plot of Aniimo is fairly basic: you’re traveling from place to place, learning about the world and its inhabitants. It has an episodic feel, where each chapter is its own little story, almost certainly derived from other free-to-play gacha style games. However, what could have been a solid way of introducing the game’s world is ruined by constant interruptions calling on you to do busywork.
Multiple times during the initial quests around Bloomville, Pawprint Studio would stop, tell me to wander off to a random forest on the other side of the map, and do some generic quests like catching an arbitrary number of Aniimo. None of this was ever connected to the story or even the area I was in and, while I get it was attempting to get me to engage with the game’s systems, there had to be a better way to incorporate this. Like have the objectives tied to the area and get NPCs directly engaging with you about them. These are things that other games manage just fine, but Aniimo seems incapable of doing.
This disjointed nature extends to the farming sim elements heavily touted in Pawprint Studio’s marketing. There is, in fact, a place to set up a farm. Much like Palworld, you can get your Aniimo to automate production. But this all happens entirely in its own pocket dimension away from everything else and doesn’t really have much to do with anything. At least your Palworld bases exist in the actual open world where they served a purpose.
The problem with Aniimo is it feels like Pawprint Studio has ambitions to do many things at once, but all of its elements are half-baked. It can be seen everywhere, from the gacha-style reward systems that scream at you from multiple menus, the bland and oversaturated art style that raises my suspicions about AI usage, and the endless technical issues that plagued my playthrough so badly that I had to switch from PC to PS5. Even then, it only stopped the regular crashing every 20 minutes! The pop-in and broken animations persisted.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.siliconera.com/review-aniimo-is-a-constantly-distracting-experience/
