PiMon

Somewhere between the desktop goldfish and the virtual pet revival sits PiMon, HatCatGames' January 2025 release about Personal-computer Integrated Monsters: digital creatures that hatch from an egg on your screen, live in a small movable room, and quietly run their own lives while you run yours.

What the loop feels like

One morning the egg is there, and you pin its little room wherever you like: top, bottom, floating over your spreadsheets. You feed it in the bathroom, tuck it into bed when the energy bar sags, and send it off to the gym, where the activity bar fills itself while you answer email. The creature grinds stats, you grind your inbox. That's PiMon.

Later you decide to be a better admin, so you open the Active Play panel and pet and comb its fur, or run a room mini-game: matching books in the library, hitting targets in the gym, faster than the room's automation ever manages on its own. Intellect jumps ahead of schedule, and the update button starts blinking. That's PiMon.

Rooms, stats and versions

The machinery has named systems. Room Automation is the idle core: specialised rooms (the gym, library, racetrack, shop and saloon) autonomously raise health, attack, intellect, speed, loyalty and beauty. Active Play mini-games accelerate the same stats by hand. Version Upgrades are the spine: meet the thresholds, press the update button, and your creature walks up through versions; Version 4.0 is confirmed, with higher forms hinted behind special criteria.

Soft Resetting through the bathroom reverts your creature to an egg while keeping accumulated stats and previously unlocked forms, which is the genre's prestige in all but name. Hard Resetting is the opposite: overfeed it, rest it when it is not tired, or let food and energy hit empty too often, and the wipe takes stats and forms outright. PvP exists too, through Steam's Remote Play Together or any screen-share, for settling whose pet is stronger.

Where it stumbles

Community consensus is frank: this plays like a first commercial project. The interface is called clunky and hard to read, the window sometimes forces itself over your other work, the pets are static with minimal animation, and stats can feel disconnected from anything except evolution triggers. Mini-games get called uninspired, and players report misregistered inputs and softlocks with poor feedback on how to progress. For most casual players it is a proof-of-concept; the audience is virtual-pet completionists who want a low-commitment background companion, ideally picked up cheap. If the desktop-pet idea appeals, the neighbouring shelves hold ZM Desktop Elf and Let's Pet Pets.

Playing it today

PiMon is Windows only, sold on Steam, with local co-op and Remote Play Together for the battle side. Our platform check surfaced an iOS app called Pi Day Memory Games by Pimon, which is by a completely different developer, so no mobile link here: PiMon itself has no verified mobile release.

The verdict

A charming idea executed with visible fingerprints. Keep it if you have always wanted a creature quietly levelling up beside your work; skip it if rough edges break the illusion of a living desktop.