Tattletail is a downloadable adventure game. What is all about? Well, if you were alive and in tune with pop culture fads during the 1990s then you may remember Bandai’s Tamagotchi craze. These virtual pets dangled from the keychains of millions of consumers around the world and spawned a whole subculture and genre of gaming devoted to caring for a virtual pet. Reaching its apex in expressions such as Nintendo’s Nintendogs for the DS portable system and Seaman for the Sega Dreamcast, virtual pet games, for the most part, started with a keychain toy from Bandai.
How to Download Tattletail
To get a copy of Tattletail click on the Download button which is located below this review. The game can be purchased on Steam for a small price of $4.99. It’s worth to know that the game collected so many positive reviews that it even got its own tune called Tattletail Song, the original got 6 million, while the remix amazing 15 million YouTube views. Here it is.
The Game Review
Irresistibly cute, part of the fun of Tamagotchi was the feeling that you had ownership over the creature’s virtual life. You fed it and played games with it as well as cleaned up after it when it made a mess. In short, Tamagotchi simulated what it would be like to own a pet without the expense of actually doing just that.
One thing these experiences had in common was that they were relatively passive, non-violent iterations of the same idea. But imagine a Tamagotchi style game but with survival horror elements.
That is Waygetter Electronics’ Tattletail, a pet-raising simulation game with survival horror elements.
If you’re scratching your head and wondering what in the world we could possibly mean by that well imagine you’re a caretaker of a virtual pet that you’ve kidnapped from its mother. And it’s mother is not taking this lying down but instead proceeds to hunt you to retrieve her child. This is the central conceit of Tattletail.
Not only does it work but it’s perhaps one of the most unique combinations in gameplay today. Referred to as “Mama”, the mother of your virtual pet is no slouch when it comes to getting her baby back and a lot of your choices in the game have to weight the child’s needs with the need to stay on the lam from mama.
Released in 2016 as a single-player experience, Tattletail relies upon mechanics that are vaguely reminiscent of Five Nights at Freddy’s. Basically, this means that a lot of the scares are jump scares and revolve around avoiding the mama of your virtual pet. You have five days leading up to Christmas during which you have to both take care of the child and achieve in-game objectives all while avoiding its mother. If you do not take care of the child it will cry and this will draw mama to your location but if you do not accomplish in-game objectives you won’t be able to advance.
It’s just the kind of balancing act that makes survival horror games so compelling and Tattletail has it mastered because so much of the choices in the game are left up to the player. There is no set course outside of completing objectives and how you go about it is largely up to the player’s own creativity.
Another awesome aspect of Tattletail is that, even though it is a survival horror game, it never feels frustrating or nightmare inspiring. It wants you to play the game and doesn’t go out of its way to make concepts that are otherwise creepy enough even more so through gratuity (which could also cheapen the experience).
