Back in February I declared that desktop pets are so back, and then partial-screen idler games (pets and otherwise) wound up being so much more back this year than I had predicted. In a year of increasingly experimental cozy games, they were one of the most identifiable and quintessentially cozy trends.
Subgenre trends happen all over gaming (the battle royale to extraction shooter pipeline, for instance) and cozy games are no exception. For a few years after Stardew Valley, absolutely everyone was making a farm sim. Then there was the influx of Townscaper-chasing cozy building games. This year it was the desktop idlers.
They’ve got their roots back in the early 2000s when desktop pets were novelty applications that ran from your system tray in the bottom right. Back then, they were pretty minimal little apps that ran some simple animations and you could maybe have a couple interactions with.
Desktop pets have completely evolved for their 2025 rebirth. No longer just glorified .gifs, they’ve become entire idler games ticking away in a fraction of your monitor just waiting for you to take a little break from work to poke at them.
You can oversee a tiny island tended by a frog in Ropuka’s Idle Island, build a small suburb of Sims-like folks in My Little Life, or plot a farm with Pokémon-like critters in Your Big, Cute Monster Farm. Here’s just a sample of other tiny incremental games that snap to a portion of your screen from this year:
There’s even an entire “Bottom of your screen bundle” on Steam so you can grab a ton at once.
Desktop pets and idler games seem like such a left field trend for this year—how did they just explode out of nowhere? They do really fit the moment we’re in right now, if you think about it though. What are partial-screen games if not the less brainrotted version of those TikToks where an infinite runner game plays at the bottom of a video just to keep your little monkey brain entertained through a clip from a podcast you’ve never seen before? Now you can focus on your main screen while your little critters tick away at the bottom instead.
At least one of these little desktop games actually did make my work days more productive. On-Together, currently a demo but with a full release coming in January, is a cozy co-working game where you and your friends log in together and plop your avatars down to work side by side so you can set a focus timer and be more productive in real life. It’s like a tiny MMO version of body-doubling. It does come in a full screen mode like a normal game but you can turn it into a little desktop pet version and tuck you and your pals away in the corner of your screen to work in peace.
The cozy game trend is still on the rise (so much so that it may have gotten a little too trendy for its own good this year) but the horde of adorable desktop pets feels like proof that there’s still so much innovation and delight left to be had in cozy gaming. I can’t wait to find out what pops off next year. For now though, I’ve got a whole lot of little screen critters that need my attention.
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