I crossbred a fork with a starfish and created a monster

Hybrid Animals is a nightmarish animal creation game in early access on steam. The current build, which is apparently soon to be expanded to include a sandbox style open world and a ‘dynamic and randomly generated storyline’, has online multiplayer with which to battle your hideous monstrosities. The monstrosities in question are created by breeding two different blocky animals and/or humanoids and/or inanimate objects together and seeing the result. It’s like if Minecraft brought out a ‘The Dog Fighting of Doctor Moreau’ DLC.

Sadly I couldn’t find any active lobbies to join so I can’t speak much to the overall quality of the multiplayer, although I did try out the mode designed to play as if you’re drunk, which, to the developer’s credit, did result in your avatar moving sideways when you thought it was moving forwards, and made me physically lean away from the screen and wince in anticipation of being sick all over it. It looked like this:

I spent most of my time breeding and inbreeding creatures in pursuit of genetic perfection in the Experimentation portion of the game, which is a nightmarish but entertaining way to pass time. All you need to do is choose a father and a mother animal and it will produce a hybrid animal (that’s the name of the game!) with scores for Damage, Health, and Speed. This is more effective in some cases than others, but in every instance you’ll be left with a hideous and unsettling beast which would undoubtedly be screeching “Kiiiiiiiill meeeeeeee!” if your mutative evolutionary process had deigned to give it a functional tongue. Observe:

This is the quick Feathered Strider, despite the fact that it’s not actually that quick. It is the result of an unholy union between a male chicken and a female giraffe, so take a moment to consider the logistics involved in that – although they’re not as concerning if it had been the other way around. It has no evolutionary advantages whatsoever, being ‘weak’ and with ‘low HP’. Its eyes bulge from the sides of its skull like a prize winning King Charles Spaniel. It will surely not live long. Yet I can use it to breed even more monstrosities, or force it to fight in a deathmatch arena for my own amusement (against other horrors which ought not to have been created by God, let alone man).

I then discovered you could use inanimate objects for genetic-source purposes and made a poodle/guitar cross. I assume it would be called a poodletar in dog fancier parlance. The Fluffy Strummer actually looks like it would survive a day out of a hermetically sealed lab, although it sounds like it was named after a battery powered toy you’d buy from Ann Summers.

Some of the most distressing animals are as a result of crossing a human with a beast, as in the Beach Man, a crab/human mix which is clearly in constant, debilitating pain.

The most aggressive and powerful mixes I found were ones involving the scorpion, octopus, wasp, and lion (as well as throwing some alligator in the mix), but breeding animals that are actually capable is clearly nowhere near as much fun as forcing sad ones into a miserable existence. I noticed several extremely slow animals in the roster: a turtle, a sloth, a snail, and a starfish, and tried to breed the slowest animal possible. I began by crossing the animals I assumed were the slowest possible: a snail and a sloth.

As you can see this animal was fairly slow, not to mention slightly unsettling to look at – but not wholly unsettling, more like it could be a friendly subterranean creature in a Zelda game. In any case, it didn’t move glacially enough for my weird science purposes, and I tried crossing all the animals against one another until I remembered I could introduce, for example, a fork. I logically thought that two inanimate inanimate objects together would create a creature that could not move, but it turns out that cheeseburgers have a surprising turn of speed on them. Eventually I ended up crossing a starfish with a fork, and then breeding more fork into the line, until I got what I assume is a piece of cutlery that can feel pain.

When you’ve crossbred things enough the naming conventions break down and the game starts calling the resulting creatures stuff like ‘Mutant’ or, in this case, ‘GOD’. Imagine using a fork that can sucker onto you with some vestigial starfish arms. Imagine how the metal of the fork fuses into moist, granular skin. Imagine being blind, deaf, and dumb, knowing nothing of the world but what you can feel immediately around you.

Then I got bored and crossed the Fluffy Strummer and the Feathered Strider and made an unhappy, yet somehow powerful creature.

It only has half its eyes. You can also make a Santa T-Rex. I enjoyed this game very much.