Bugaboo Pocket is a Tamagotchi full of creepy crawlies

I grew up playing with a lot of desktop pets, which probably explains my need to have so many real ones now I have my own money and free will. But there's something about bugs which just puts me off owning them. Mostly because of their short lifespans and my larger critters which would eat a bug in a heartbeat. Luckily, Bugaboo Pocket has come along to satiate my yearning for more obscure animals without having to set up more tanks and clear more room in my house.

If you had any generation of Tamagotchi in the past, you'll be familiar with the routine of Bugaboo Pocket. You start with a little golden insect egg which you need to nurture until it hatches into a small version of a bug: initially, a rubber ducky isopod. From here you raise it until it's fully grown while also doing things like cleaning up its mess, decorating its house, and most importantly making it wear little hats.

By spending time with your little critter, a bond is formed, which can flourish into a friendship, exactly like a Tamagotchi, which is all documented in a tiny journal you can check at any time to see what your bug really thinks of you.

Outside of forcing whatever outfits I could onto my fingernail-sized friends, my favourite part of Bugaboo Pocket is the mini games that come with each bug. Each species comes with a set of three minigames, all of which are slightly different to one another. For a rubber ducky isopod, you start with a game of pachinko before moving onto a game involving stacking blocks to create a path. When you eventually move onto hatching weevils you get to play a game like red light green light. But my favourite is the orchid mantis whose signature game is basically Fruit Ninja, except you get to chop up what looks like woodchips and your weapons are your own raptorial legs.

These minigames are an incredibly fun way to shake up the routine of staring into the insect tank and praying something more exciting happens than watching them use the bathroom. There are also very simple quests, tasking you with raising bugs with specific personalities. But it's the minigames that kept me nurturing my little pets. Without them, Bugaboo Pocket It could quite easily slip exclusively into the idle category—at least if the bugs weren't so hungry all the time.

You'll spend a lot of time sitting and waiting for something to happen, like your bug to growing up. But this also gives you a lot of time to sit and develop a connection with whichever insect you're raising. It's easy to become quite attached to them. Unfortunately, these insects don't last forever, and there comes a time where I have to let them go. And by let go I mean either preserve them as a wet specimen in a jar, bury them, or pin them to a board to make a taxidermy frame of them.

After a fair few hours of playing and watching my bugs die, I couldn't help but question if I was doing something wrong. Sure, these things happen naturally, but at what point do you stop blaming the circle of life and start blaming yourself? I had to keep reminding myself that there's only so much you're actually responsible for in Bugaboo Pocket, so there's very little opportunity to mess up.

But as is the way with things like this, the guilt becomes overwhelming when you're staring at a wall of all your pinned pets. I think that's just a me problem, though. I doubt anyone else playing will feel as responsible for their bundle of pixels. And it hasn't stopped me from hatching more and repeating the cycle, either.