My Tamagotchi Forever is even more annoying than actual Tamagotchi

Those of us who played with Tamagotchis during their heyday will recall how obnoxious they were when they beeped during class. My Tamagotchi Forever is worse.

Bandai Namco and Paladin Studios are trying to bring back Tamagotchis with My Tamagotchi Forever, but I’m hard-pressed to say exactly why.

Tamagotchi pets came to North America in 1997 and spiked in popularity in the following years. I was about seven years old when they first made it to my school, and the perfect age to get excited about them. My parents, ever anti-fad, refused to purchase a Tamagotchi for me. Instead, I bothered my grandmother until she got me a knock-off version called a Digi Pet that was just as obnoxious as a Tamagotchi but was just a cat instead of a quirky Japanese monster.

Everyone quickly grew to regret this purchase. It beeped incessantly! So did everyone’s Tamagotchis, resulting in them being banned from school. Everyone tried to sneak them via their backpacks, but inevitably, we’d forget to mute them and they’d go off during class, get confiscated, and die before we could get them back. The tiny reset button on the back of mine quickly was covered in marks from the very sharp pencils I had to use to push it and revive my dead cat. Parents did not enjoy these, and we children never remembered to clean up after them, proving for the next several years that we were definitely not responsible enough for a real puppy.

Bandai Namco and Paladin Studios think we’re nostalgic for this time, though, so they’ve released My Tamagotchi Forever to simulate all the fun of having a Tamagotchi on your phone with better graphics and less beeping. It’s free, so I picked it up last week, and somehow I’m regretting this download even more than I regretted coaxing my grandmother into getting me a knock-off Tamagotchi in 1998.

Instead of beeping constantly, your Tamagotchi sends you a stream of push notifications. Most games I play will check in with a notification once, maybe twice a day. I don’t like them, but I keep them on to remind myself that I’m actively playing games. My Tamagotchi Forever sends them every time your pet is hungry, sleepy, or needs to poop. Yeah.

That’s pretty frequently, by push notification standard, too. Here is a set that I got. Note that it’s not 20 minutes after the set in the screenshot above:

To the game’s credit, it is not always this bad. After evolving my Tamagotchi, the notifications spaced themselves somewhat more reasonably, but I still get far too many a day and far too many at once. But we haven’t even talked about actually playing the game yet, which is an exercise in patience and ad tolerance.

Your Tamagotchi needs regular maintenance: food, play, sleep, and bathroom breaks. Instead of pushing a button to feed your pet, you have to go buy each individual piece of food with coins and drag it to the Tamagotchi to feed it, which quickly becomes tedious when it needs, like, ten pieces of food to get full. Sleep and games aren’t so bad, but the toilet sections are a real kicker. You have to rapidly tap on your Tamagotchi to get it to poop in a toilet, then tap pieces of poop on the floor to clean them up, because apparently feeding a Tamagotchi one apple converts immediately into about five poos. It’s really, really weird.

Your Tamagotchi is a whiny crybaby, though it tries to be cute and you can take pictures of it doing things like jumping on a trampoline, or in AR in your living room, if you like. There’s nothing especially satisfying to Tamagotchi Forever, though. You can evolve the Tamagotchi and dress it up, but otherwise, you’re only rewarded with one loop after another, and eventually, the coins you get from regular gameplay don’t cut it anymore and you’re being pestered to buy into microtransactions.

My Tamagotchi Forever somehow managed to encapsulate all the bad things about Tamagotchis and none of the good ones. Maybe this was fun when the pets were tiny digital buddies that could be cared for with a button or two, but the last thing I need is a virtual thing yelling at me via push notification all day at work that it has to go to the toilet. It’s available for free on the App Store and Google Play, though, if you don’t have enough needy creatures in your life already.