I very recently wrote in my Freefall ‘95 review that it should be short-lived, but was, and is, a fun game for a quick pick-up-and-play session. Tiny Capsule Collector is the opposite. Yet another idler, this one sits on your screen where miserable animals pace up and down, spending money on gacha and dropping the rubbish on the floor, no matter how many bins you place. On the flip side, you get some money for cleaning up.
What might be the shortest summary of a title (this is a preview, not a full review), the overall experience was covered in about 20 minutes or so. A tutorial, which is one dialogue box that says to click left to interact with one of the gacha machines you’ll place, while the right one will allow you to take one for yourself. It does not tell you that you have to manually refill them, though the machines are visibly empty.
Tiny Capsule Collector encourages you to place a machine at the bottom of the screen; then one of these sad sacks will walk past, buy a toy, and it’ll open up to reveal a toy. You get some money, and that’s it. As the money rolls in, it’s time to purchase some more machines and scale up. You can then add various toy sets, also purchasable. Other than that, you can change the colour of the machine and put some animal ears on it, because…
The second part of ‘the fun’ is to interact with the machines to collect the items yourself. When you get a full set… nothing happens. Outside of the monotony of watching the same animals pace up and down to the incessant sound effects of them opening it (I turned the music off as that doesn’t work for me in an idler), you can decorate the area with non-interactable objects such as signs and fire hydrants. Even from a cosmetic basis, this didn’t add anything to it.
And while expectations are fair for an idler that’s also a demo, the layout is quite unusual compared to other games such as Tame-a-goat-chi and Kernelbay in that you can’t resize the screens or move them around. There’s a full-screen option, which is a good feature, but as this is an idler, watching Tiny Capsule Collector and nothing else isn’t entertaining. The worst part is that the screen takes over my taskbar, and I am unable to interact with it whatsoever, so in order to write this up, I had to search for my app via the start menu. Alternatively, I could have just switched it off – which I’m about to do.
