My Secret Pets!

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

My Secret Pets! is a “reverse harem”-style Visual Novel released on PC in 2016 and brought to Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game casts you in the role of a woman who suddenly and inexplicably gets dumped by her boyfriend, and the next morning awakens to find her various pets (a cat, a rabbit, a cockatoo, and a pig) have all transformed into attractive young men eager to get romantic with her.

If you read that last paragraph and were taken aback, I assure you that the game makes this even worse by seeming to have no idea how weird or creepy this is. I wouldn’t ever want to go as far as to mock the sort of kinks other people are into, but when none of the characters in this story seem to think this situation is all that unusual, and these former pets-turned-eager suitors don’t hesitate for a moment to start not only fighting for the protagonist’s affections, but physically pushing themselves on her. It’s… very awkward and… well, creepy.

However, even if you’re the sort who fantasizes about your beloved pet turning into a guy and ravishing you, My Secret Pets! does so very poorly. This game doesn’t give us a decent introduction to any of its characters – we don’t get to know anything about the main character (who the player names), her boyfriend (the only human love interest), and the only animal the players see before the presumably magical transformations is the main character’s dog, who doesn’t transform with the rest for some inexplicable reason.

The presentation here is nothing special either. While the hand-drawn artwork is decent, it does nothing spectacular, and the synthesized music is outright annoying. As for the gameplay, there’s very little in the way of choice that seems to matter all that much beyond picking which suitor’s story to follow from the main menu. At times players can choose a response to a question, but these responses generally seem to make little difference in the story. At the very least I can say this game makes good use of touchscreen controls, though it works perfectly fine with normal gamepad controls too.

But in the end, I can’t see a good reason to recommend My Secret Pets! To anyone. The story is sloppy and doesn’t do anything to properly introduce its characters, the presentation is unremarkable at best and abrasive at worst, and the gameplay is virtually nonexistent. Even if you’re the sort of person who dreams about romancing your pets, this game isn’t for you.

tl;dr – My Secret Pets! is a Visual Novel about a girl who gets dumped only to have her various pets all transform into attractive men eager to get close to her. Even if that premise doesn’t strike you as creepy in and of itself, it’s done in by the poor quality of the writing, the lack of any significant influence on the story, and the terrible presentation. Even if you’re that kind of pet-lover, you’ll want to skip this one.

Grade: D

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