I’ve adopted a virtual pet who lives in a surprisingly expansive world that sits at the bottom of my desktop, and it’s all in a window no bigger than a Discord notification. Created by Kardboard Kings developer Oscar Brittain, Nanomon Virtual Pet is an amalgamation of Tamagotchi toys, the desktop pet generation engine DPet, and two Digimon games: the 1998 Japan-exclusive Digital Monster Ver. S: Digimon Tamers and fan-made DV Pet.
 
It’s not an idle game, but it’s also not super involved either—it’s much less stressful than keeping a Tamagotchi alive in your pocket. Brittain described it more as what you remember the Tamagotchi being like rather than actually being a Tamagotchi.

“How do I get across the feeling of real-time stress without having people [getting stressed?]” Brittain asked. “Does it get hungry when you’re not playing the game? Do I have to open the game every five minutes? I had to design things that felt like they were sort of [in] real time, without actually being real time.”

Here’s how Nanomon Virtual Pet works: You start with a little blob of a pet who bounces around the screen. Like any other virtual pet, it has needs. It gets hungry, thirsty, and sad. I feed my little creature pieces of meat straight off the bone, slices of pizza, and cartons of milk. It poops, and I clean it up. We go on field trips together, bouncing around different environments—beaches, ruins, mushroom forests—to forage for items, battle other creatures, and seek out secrets. That’s how my Nanomon gained enough experience points to level up; from a little white blob, it’s grown into a slightly larger, off-white blob, then into a cute little dinosaur with a floppy tongue. My Nanomon bops around, taking itself on walks, while I check my emails and type, type away. When my Nanomon is tired or lacks health due to an overmatched battle, I send him back home for a nap under a blanket.

It is, indeed, the feeling of taking care of a digital creature like a Tamagotchi, but without the constant, nagging fear of death. Nanomon Virtual Pet even has its own game manual, which is pulled up in a separate executable file from the game. The manual fills out as you play the game as if it were a Pokédex, Brittain said. “I liked making [the manual] because I was able to do something really overtly nostalgic and just referential,” he said.

Brittain said he hopes for Nanomon Virtual Pet to be the sort of game that people come back to and check in with day after day, similar to how people approached Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the pandemic. They don’t need to actively play the game for hours a day, but they can spend a bit of time checking in on their pet and seeking out the world. You can simply keep Nanomon Virtual Pet up all day while you work on your computer, and your digital pet bounds along on screen. Nanomon Virtual Pet is one of an increasing number of desktop, idle-ish games that are designed to linger in the background. It’s how I’m playing the game right now. My little Nanomon is taking up a small part of the very Google Doc I’m writing this story in. 

There’s been an increasing number of these sorts of games over the past couple of years, like Rusty’s Retirement, which puts a farming simulator at the bottom of your desktop screen, or Cornerpond, which adds a fishing minigame to your workday. (When Rusty’s Retirement launched in 2024, Brittain said he panicked—someone beat him to the desktop game punch, despite Nanomon Virtual Pet being in development for seven or so years, off and on.)

There were two big things to consider when making a game designed to take up precious desktop space, to run in the background as a player, essentially, double-tasks: It can’t be too big, and it can’t be too small. It has to have vibes—good ones—that people want to hear in the background. “I remember, at some point, looking at the size of a Discord notification,” Brittain said, and that inspired the game's default size. (Nanomon Virtual Pet has settings to adjust how big or small the application is to account for monitors of various sizes.) And then there’s the music by a composer who goes by yoppi, which adds dreamy, ambient beats to the experience. Brittain sent yoppi a bunch of videos to compose to but ended up forgetting to send a build of the game. “I had thought they had a build of the game for ages,” Brittain said. “And then they were like, ‘Could I play it at some point?’ And I’m like, ‘What? What do you mean?’”

Brittain expects people to do the same thing he does—keep the game open just to listen to the soundtrack. Sure, you could pull it up elsewhere, but it’s a nice motivator to check in on your Nanomon and seek out an environment with your favorite song. “I have this dream that people will be like, ‘I want to hear that song again,’ so they’ll go to that area of the game [just to listen].”

Nanomon Virtual Pet was released on June 24 on the Epic Games Store.