Use Clever Traps to Ward Off an Invasion of Tiny Creatures in ‘Little Critters,’ Launching Today on Meta Quest
Finding weird creatures in your house that don’t belong there can be a big problem. In Little Critters, you’ve got the solution: a series of ridiculous traps that let you smash, zap, fling, and explode a horde of colorful pint-sized monsters to stop them from invading your home.
Little Critters is a mixed-reality game that tasks you with fortifying your real-life space against tiny creatures, and it’s launching today on Meta Quest. The game takes some cues from action-strategy genres like tower defense, providing you with lots of different means of squishing, squashing, and otherwise stopping the critters as they march toward their destination. The strategy comes not only in where you place your anti-critter traps, but how those traps interact — a spring-loaded boxing glove might not be super-effective on its own, but use it to send critters flying into exploding balloons, and now you’re cooking.
With MR, your physical space is your boobytrap playground, and you’ll need to get creative with your traps as critters cross the floors, walls, and ceilings to get what they want. And the critters won’t just sit back and let you ruin their fun, either; they’ll attack your traps and fortifications and even bite a finger if you’re not careful. As you advance through waves, new critters will appear, challenging you to try new traps and develop new strategies as the critters get tougher to defeat.
Luckily, you can also literally take your defenses into your own hands — you can use your hands to smash critters, or grab a virtual slingshot and blast them as they approach your gear.
To celebrate the release of Little Critters, we sat down with James and Kelly Howard, the husband and wife duo behind indie studio Purple Yonder, to talk about bringing Little Critters to mixed reality, what players can expect when their home is invaded by tiny monsters, and how the team worked to strike its fun and funny tone.
Kelly Howard: The game starts with the player constructing the teleportation tower, a device capable of opening interdimensional portals. The tower unleashes waves of invading critters into their room, which the player must battle by using a combination of super smart traps and a high-tech slingshot to defend their turf.
Luckily, the player is not alone. A robot buddy shows them the ropes, teaching them how to build traps with the help of the 3D printer, and how to collect slimeballs, the critters’ gloopy remnants that power it.
The action begins with the Beasties, bizarre critters committed to total chaos. Progress deeper, and players will encounter the more challenging Cyborgs, a group that has gone mad in their obsession with technology. Each wave brings tougher critter types, but players can unlock stronger traps and slingshot upgrades to mount a better defense against this increasing threat.
James Howard: Ever since the Meta Quest 3 launched with colour passthrough, we were excited to see how far we could push the mixed reality tech. Our team has always been keen to explore the cutting edge and we were brimming with ideas of how we could build a new game around these capabilities. One of our early prototypes with room tracking was a small character that could run and jump onto your desk, which ultimately gave us the inspiration for a type of strategy game that takes place in your room.
We wanted Little Critters to be the kind of game anyone could jump into, even for first-timers. We both love science fiction and we took inspiration from some of our favourite casual tower defense games, like the wackiness of Plants vs. Zombies, the action from Orcs Must Die! and that “just one more wave” feeling you get from playing Bloons TD.
KH: We built a wide variety of traps, each with its own unique strengths and quirks. Some can be placed on walls or ceilings, like the Knucklebuster (a boxing glove on a spring arm), while turret-style traps like the Bubble Blaster (that traps smaller critters in soapy bubbles) can be placed strategically on furniture like tables and chairs.
Players can also get creative by combining traps to create their own clever strategies. For instance, you might set down the Toe Jammer (a sticky green goo) on the floor in the path of the Laser Blaster (a wall mounted laser) to slow critters down, so they take more damage.
JH: Back when we started developing Little Critters, there weren’t many full mixed reality experiences to look at. So, we spent a lot of time prototyping and figuring out what really makes mixed reality shine. Pretty quickly, we realized that the player’s own room had to be part of the fun. We wanted the critters to feel alive in that space, jumping on and off furniture, climbing the walls and ceiling. Of course, that meant tackling the huge technical challenge of making the game adapt to every kind of room.
When players can see their real environment in mixed reality, they naturally expect virtual objects to react as if they’re truly part of it. Over time, we kept adding new ways of interacting with the critters, and this led to some fun things like being able to load smaller critters in your slingshot and yeet them across the room!
JH: We found that injecting some goofy humour works well to draw players into the experience. We took inspiration from the classic cartoons we grew up with, where there was a lot of physical comedy, like someone taking a custard pie to the face or an anvil dropping from a height.
Our animator did an amazing job capturing that energy and giving the characters tons of personality. The humour is also very present in the sound design too, with exaggerated squeaks, splats, and the occasional well-timed fart for comedic effect. It keeps the game light-hearted and reminds players not to take things too seriously, but to enjoy the silliness of it. Even after years of development, I still find myself chuckling when something unexpected happens!
KH: Our artist designed the critters to be adorably grotesque, so you’ll find them comical one second and want to squish them the next! We wanted each of the characters to feel unique, offering a variety of challenges for the player to face.
Some of the traps that we designed early in development were more mechanical than funny. We tried to find that sweet spot between clever strategy and good old-fashioned gags. The traps might make players laugh, but they also add depth to the gameplay and help players progress further through the game.
KH: The game is divided into realms, which work a bit like levels in a more traditional game. Each realm throws multiple waves of critters your way, which gradually ramp up in difficulty, and you’ll need to hang in there until the final wave to claim victory. Throughout it all, your helpful robot buddy keeps you updated on your progress and how close you are to finishing the realm.
Every time you survive a wave, you’ll earn experience and when you level up, you’ll be rewarded with a new type of trap, slingshot projectile, or upgrade. With 35 levels of rewards to unlock, there is plenty of fun stuff for you to unlock to expand your strategy!
JH: Little Cities and Little Critters are very different styles of game but one big similarity is the amount of love that Purple Yonder has put into both games. We’re a tiny team, but every one of us has poured our heart into making something we can genuinely be proud of!
Our first update for Little Cities added support for playing with hand tracking and this was something that we decided to have working day one for Little Critters. You can, of course, play with controllers too, but playing with your hands opens up some extra possibilities. There is just something really satisfying about slapping your hand on top of a table as you squash a critter! It sounds small, but this sort of thing isn’t possible outside of the combination of mixed reality and hand tracking.
JH: Just like our previous games, we have plans to support Little Critters with new updates over time. We are already working on a localisation update to support more languages, plus we have some new content updates cooking too. Watch this space, we’ll be announcing some of our plans soon.
You can start setting monster traps all over your house in Little Critters today — download it from the Meta Horizon Store for $19.99 USD.
