Familiar Friends: What's Your Familiar?

[quote][url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_slop][b]Warning: AI Slop[/b][/url] This game is partially or completely made with talentless, soulless AI generated content.[/quote] "Familiar Friends: What's Your Familiar?" isn't a game, it's a cringey non-game high school anime club dropout fan-fiction that's been dumped on Steam into the games section. As a visual novel, it doesn't have any gameplay. It's just a lot of clicking through bad, cringe dialogue that no real publisher would ever accept. When people can't get their work published in print, they pay the $100 fee to dump their fan-fiction here instead, where we have to put up with it when looking for things that are actual PC games. This e-book is a cringey mess, basically a CYOA where you answer questions and get an e-book CYOA ending that tells you what magical familiar you get. I hope you can get a familiar that can carefully explain why badly written cringey e-books aren't games. The e-book visuals are all AI slop, trained without permission on copyrighted works... whenever a developer, or in this case really bad author, uses AI Slop, they are directly, wilfully committing contributary copyright infringement. Visual…

I want to recommend this because it's free, the concept isn't bad, and the studio hasn't let me down in the past. However, this is so heavily reliant on AI that I just can't. A lot of the art looks odd when you look at it closely, and the game uses different art styles that clash in a way that's distracting. Even if the AI art looked good, it would still be a problem, though. It's contributing to the new standard of AI art in games, which will cost artists their jobs and gamers their quality products. I appreciate that the devs admitted to the AI use and said they paid their artists and don't use stolen artwork, but that doesn't change any of what I just explained. This game is also lacking the depth of answers you get from the Test series; instead of any soul searching, you get a short blurb about your animal. And while that's cute, it robs the game of its potential depth. Also, the slideshow at the end felt pointless. I didn't understand why I was watching a bunch of pictures of characters and scenes that weren't part of the game. Despite the message at the end of the game, I feel like this game was made to test the waters of whether or not the studio can get away with using AI i…

Familiar Friends: What’s Your Familiar?, developed and published by Randumb Studios, is a small-scale, choice-driven visual novel that leans more toward a personalized, introspective experience than a traditional story-heavy game. Instead of focusing on a structured narrative with clear conflicts and resolutions, it builds itself around the idea of self-expression, inviting players to explore their own preferences and personality through a series of guided choices. The result is something that feels closer to an interactive personality exercise wrapped in a gentle fantasy setting than a conventional visual novel. The core of the experience is built around decision-making. Players are presented with a sequence of scenarios, questions, and prompts that gradually shape the outcome of their journey. These choices are not framed as branching story paths in the usual sense, but rather as inputs that define the kind of magical familiar the player will ultimately receive. This design removes the pressure of “right” or “wrong” decisions, instead encouraging players to respond naturally. The appeal lies in the anticipation—watching how each choice contributes to a final result that is meant…

"Harley the Hamster" . . . okay. Small person racists over here. STG

I got the owl. I...want to give this a neutral review. It took 15 minutes to complete which is fine, it's a free little game and I appreciate that. But there's just a couple things that I need to critique. The art style of the cat and the owl is wildly different from the rest of the art in the game. I know you guys used AI and I'm not that upset over that...but the inconsistency in the art style was very jarring and definitely dampened the experience. I would have much preferred if the cat and owl looked like the animals in the end scenes. Same with the ending music. The game is very fantasy coded and the end song is some AI rock song that just doesn't fit the theme. So, yeah. Small, free, not bad, kinda cute, but could use some tweaking in my opinion.

Loved this! My familiar IRL is a rabbit, but in this game it was Sonja the Skunk and she was ADORABLE <3