Critters for Sale

Critters for Sale is a compilation of five short interactive stories — titled Snake, Goat, Monkey, Dragon and Spider — that play out across different eras and locations and touch on themes like time travel, black magic and immortality. The journey takes you through characters familiar and foreign, ranging from inhabitants of a garden in Earth's orbit to aliens from Neptune, Noid Men from neighboring timelines, and residents of a place called the Reincarnation Palace.

The gameplay is a hybrid of point-and-click adventure and visual novel. You take the role of characters who marked the unseen history of the world as we know it, sitting at the center of events that portray a cosmic force looming above and rooting for evil — wanting to see you and your world crumble. The actions and choices you make throughout each story influence its outcome, leading to either your death or survival. Evade your doom across enough of them, and you might make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

The five episodes can be played in any order, and each has multiple endings. The cumulative effect is exploring a network of interconnected ideas about cosmology, history and personal agency rather than following a single arc. The source material draws heavily on the surreal horrors of Middle Eastern and North African folktales, and the visual style — gritty, mythological, unflinching — supports the source material without softening it.

For players who like dense narrative-driven experiences that don't fit neatly into a single genre, Critters for Sale is unusually distinctive. It's brief, weird, occasionally disturbing, and committed to its specific mythological imagination in ways that more conventional adventure games rarely attempt.