The creatures you collect in first-person farming sim Among the Wild might not be as helpful as you hope: 'They're more of a pain in the ass'

There's a fine line between adorable and horrifying, and Among The Wild has one boot on either side of it. Revealed  at the PC Gaming Show today, the first game from Swedish developer Nuggets Entertainment is a first-person farming sim, exploration adventure, and creature-collector. And those creatures sure are cute… except, are they?

For instance, the pudgy yellow-beaked birds we see in the trailer are almost cute but their eyeballs are just a little too big and their pupils just a bit too beady, such that they border on sinister looking… so while I do want to pick them up I don't really want to hug them. Then there's your mount, which has the stocky pink body of a giant pig (cute!) but the face and horns of some sort of… pug-faced lizard? I don't even want to know what unholy union led to that creature—but it does look fun to ride around on.

And then there are the stars of the trailer, those round fuzzy creatures with mouths that are a little too wide to be trustworthy. You just get the feeling they might look around, blink a few times, and then abruptly swallow someone's pet cat without ever losing that big, chummy grin. There's even something a little off about the character you play in Among the Wild: at first a young shepherd in a bright yellow poncho doesn't seem suspicious, but why are they wearing a mask and a hood?

I'm intrigued, in other words, by this bright and colorful yet oddly off-kilter world where you build a farm in the wilderness, plant crops, tend bees, cook, craft, and collect creatures. But unlike a lot of critter-collecting games, those little monsters living on your farm might not be as helpful as you expect.

«It's probably more the opposite,» says Nuggets Entertainment founder Tim Badylak. «They're more of a pain in the ass.» Dealing with the critters on your farm is more like herding misbehaving children, in other words, so in the trailer where you see a creature excitedly running around with a log or a crate, if you look closely you'll