Cassette Beasts looks like a PC Pokémon where you can smoosh critters together

If you go around cramming your pockets full of monsters, accidents will happen. Just look at Cassette Beasts, a newly-announced Pokémon-ish battler where critters can temporarily fuse together into powerful new forms. Presumably they're gummed together with lint, a Werther's Original, and one of the old pound coins shops no longer accept. Come see some of the mighty merged forms in the trailer below.

They're not actually pocket monsters, mind. Instead, the real monsters are us. As we've all known. All along. Apparently folks on this island record monsters onto tapes, then play them back to themselves turn into the monsters, and look you can't tell me Pokéballs are any more sensible than that.

It's being made by Bytten Studio, a pair of former Chucklefish folks whose debut game was the Zelda-ish Lenna's Inception. They say Cassette Beasts is partially inspired by Alex Onsager's Pokémon fusion doodad, which combines sprites of pocket monsters to create new critters. My favourite take on that sorta thing is Louan Ben's Emoji Mashup Bot.

Cassette Beasts is headed to Windows and Linux via Steam. No word yet on when it'll launch. Read more about the game on its website, and see a few merged monsters in this browser-based fusion demo.

Pokémon is one of those games that makes me eye Nintendo consoles with jealousy, one of those which never seems to get a PC equivalent with the same sort of magic. Can't get a great Zelda or Animal Crossing round here either, though god knows people try. The newest big Pokéhope on PC is Temtem, currently in early access, but that's an MMO and ah that's not the same.