If you’re looking for a full-on blast from the past, look no further than My Tamagotchi Forever for iOS and Android. Since it’s now officially available worldwide — aside from Japan and China– you’re no longer required to carry around a brightly colored egg-shaped keychain to get your Tamagotchi fix.
With My Tamagotchi Forever, you’re still raising your Tamagotchi the same way you normally would — feeding it, washing it, cleaning up after it, and putting it to bed. It also places you in the heart of Tamatown, where you get to customize the village with different things like a swing set or soccer a goal.
You will get to see your Tamagotchi evolve through its different stages as you continue to play the game. But the type of character you get will always be a surprise — it’s all dependent on how you take care of it. You won’t have to worry about checking in on it either since your phone will provide you with notifications when it is in need of attention.
In true millennial fashion, you can even take photos of your Tamagotchi completing different activities. The pictures are stored in a photo album which you can then share with others through text or email. Completing pages of the album will also earn you different rewards like clothing or forms of currency.
It also supports augmented reality functionalities using ARKit for Apple and ARCore for Google, which allows you to play hide-and-seek games with your Tamagotchi in real surroundings. So basically, your Tamagotchi can come to life in your very own living room — which sounds kind of terrifying, but we all know it’s a feature we would’ve begged for back in the 1990s.
Even though the game is free to play, it’s highly reminiscent of Animal Crossing where you will only really get ahead by making in-app purchases. It isn’t free from advertisements either — to receive free gifts, it will often ask you to watch a 30-second video. But you can still gather coins and level up by playing mini-games.
We played around a bit with My Tamagotchi Forever and thought the experience was interesting. We thought it was a refreshing change to be able to see our Tamagotchi in color and interact with it via touchscreen rather than tiny buttons on the original device. But the addition of in-app purchases and currencies made it feel like more work than it should be.
You can download My Tamagotchi Forever from the App Store and Google Play Store. For now, we think we’re going to stick to our keychains — it’s much cheaper, anyway.