Entranced by bad dino game, a phone app I play on my gaming PC via emulator, shitting the bed so badly that my ratio of loading screens to playtime is 12:1 as of the latest update. This PC can run FFXIV, Discord, LibreOffice Calc and 1,085 tabs of Firefox concurrently with no hiccups. But when I try to load a game-friend's extremely simplified zoo so I can spend 15 seconds blingling the hingle for my daily doodad, I am sitting at the loading screen for five minutes. And I am doing better than most, because most people playing on actual mobile devices simply cannot get the game past the loading screen at all.
BONUS: they published this absolute gem of an update in the middle of three overlapping events (the kind of mobile app "event" where the idea is to penalize player progress if they don't open the game frequently enough) so the response on social media has been uuuuhhhhh you can probably guess.
They apparently didn't have any leads on WTF is causing this before Thursday and "Easter is a long weekend" so this bug, which to reiterate is not only making the game inoperable for swathes of people and laggy for the rest but furthermore doing this during "pls log in 6 times today Or Else" events, is going to be live and unaddressed for at least a full week.
Why do I hear polka in the distance...?
I hate hunting for new sources of Smol Creacher dopamine but it might be time once again. If anyone has reccomendations, I'm all ears! Very many details about what I want under the cut ↓
Details about I'm looking for:
- CUTE AMINALS. I'm flexible on what kind as long as they rate highly in Cute and Animal. And this is, uh, the Wobblegong idea of what's cute. Eurypterids ("sea scorpions") would pass as long as the art style's adorable.
- Ideally at least a tiny bit of virtual interaction: placing a zoo pen or dragging food around count, it doesn't have to be full Nintendogs, but at least a smidgen of it justifies doing this instead of drawing myself some jpegs. More interaction is great, just not crucial.
- Something with long-term play, the kind of game you check up on every day. This is unfortunately something phone app games excel at (because this way you'll give them money forever) but I'm a gamer with a gaming PC, I'd absolutely love a game that doesn't need an emulator.
- I run screaming from whaling-mandatory
gameswallet predators. I know I will probably be stuck playing something that wants me to give it $200 a month, but as long as there's a satisfying game for free I'm content. - (In fact I'm happy to buy games up front! As long as they're good/worth it. My budget is higher than $0 and I think game devs should get paid, I just hate despicably predatory mtx.)
- Does NOT need to be a new/recent release. If anything I often end up playing older games because the older they are the less toxic the mtx tends to be.

Examples of past games I played: Dragon Mania Legends, DragonVale, Neko Atsatsume, Rakko Ukabe (which is just Neko Atsatsume but sea otters), Pocket Frogs. All were between Adequate and Quite Good Wow and I only quit when the mtx went evil.
Pet sites (unfortunately!) don't scratch this itch due to the lack of direct interactions with the jpegs.
More traditional video games (Pokemon Scarlet, etc) don't scratch the itch because they're more of a thing you play to beat– you don't play it just five minutes but every day for a year.
YEAH I KNOW I'M HOPING FOR A LOT but before I sell my soul to the gllgoe play store I figured I'd see if someone just happened to have a recommendation lying around. 

