MatchyGotchy Z Impressions on Steam Early Access

Silverware Games, Inc’s MatchyGotchy Z blends idle clicker with pet-raising simulator in space, all wrapped up with cute animation and an upbeat, synth-pop-reminiscent soundtrack. The game is currently in Early Access, and, after the success of Beta testing last year, is available to the public on Steam for $5.99!

Right off the bat, players are presented with an introduction, complete with some lore about the world–most games like this don’t necessarily have storylines, so it was a pleasant surprise to see. According to said lore, the goal is to turn stars into “Rocket Surgeons” in order to produce magic. Even after playing, I don’t know what that requires or entails exactly, or what that makes the end goal, but this little tidbit of story did a good job of engaging me at the start of my playthrough.

These ‘stars’ (some look like planets) are the core of the game, and you must take care of them while they build rocket ships, which you can sell for Zoot, the in-game currency. There is not much of a tutorial, so many of the care functions do not get explained. This can be a bit confusing, but the mechanics are all intuitive and easy to understand once you actually begin using them. There are six core care mechanisms for the stars, which are operated via buttons on the bottom of the screen. ‘Food,’ ‘snacks,’ and ‘games’ are used regularly and intuitively, “selfie” is hopefully self-explanatory, and ‘clean’ and ‘health’ seem to be required fairly rarely. The ‘clean’ function didn’t show up until I was already several stars into my playthrough–your stars will occasionally show a thought bubble expressing their desire for food, a selfie, etc. The ‘clean’ and ‘health’ functions cannot even be used unless the star is displaying the appropriate thought bubble. Cleaning is pretty easy to figure out once you get to it (smashing colorful space cockroaches), but my stars have yet to require anything regarding to ‘health.’ I suppose it’s a good thing that my stars are healthy, though!

Each star also has two stat meters that must be filled in order to make them happy and efficient in their ship production. The first meter, labeled “Fuds,” represents your star’s hunger (and not, as I originally was confused by, ‘Formerly Used Defense Sites’). Stars must be fed to fill this bar. As you build ships and earn Zoot, you also unlock more snacks and food that you can feed to your stars- note that these are different categories. Snacks can fill the ‘Fuds’ bar as well, albeit less efficiently than ‘food’ items, but they also award hearts, which fill the second meter, labeled ‘Feels.’ This bar denotes the star’s overall happiness, which can be improved by gaining hearts from snacks or by playing one of several minigames with your star; a variation of the shell game, a guessing game, or hacky sack. This happiness seems to directly effect the efficiency with which the stars make ships, as a happy star is a productive star!

The more ships a star builds, the faster they are at building them, and as they level up, they gain outfits which seem to denote their rank. Once a star levels up to the third rank, you can then hatch your next star, for a total of eight. The later stars require more time to level up (so to speak) as they make their rockets much slower at first. The steam page mentions that MatchyGotchy Z includes idle clicker elements, which is true, and you do have to spend some time waiting for stars to build ships and level up. Something fairly unique to this game, however, is that only the star that you have selected at any given time will be “active.” What this means is that you must be on a star’s respective page in order for it to create ships, or even, seemingly, for its needs to decay.

One of the unique features that the game advertises is “trainable personalities.” While I definitely noticed differences in the personalities of my stars, I wasn’t sure what exactly it was that I was doing that affected said personalities. It was only when I went through the menus searching for more info that I found that apparently clicking on a star would praise it for whatever it was doing. When you click on the star, nothing noticeable happens, so if I was, in fact, reinforcing behavior, I didn’t realize it. I seemed to have the most success with my third star, which is much more efficient in terms of building ships than any of the other ones. The animation used to build ships is a hammer strike, and the amount of said strikes required to complete a ship varies wildly for each star. Earlier and higher-level stars take one or two strikes to create a rocket, while later or low-level ones can take upwards of fifty to create one rocket. For some reason, my third star makes four ships with each hammer strike! I’m definitely not complaining, but I’m curious as to what makes this particular star different than the rest. Certain foods give speed boosts, and also include percentage boosts for idle efficacy. I don’t completely understand what that entails, so I thought that perhaps the foods that I had fed this star were the source of its skill, but so far, I haven’t been able to replicate the result. It could also be that I unknowingly reinforced the correct behaviors to make a rocket-making pro. Again, this is something that I would love to see explained or fleshed-out somewhere in play, with something like a personality meter, or a set of traits that you can see changing as you reinforce certain behaviors.

There are also a few animations/responses that I don’t entirely understand. For example, I fed one of my stars a taco, and it seemed to make it very upset. It did not decay the ‘feels’ meter at all, but the star refused to build any ships, and just idled, looking grumpy. Perhaps it didn’t like tacos? I think this could be a fun mechanic if it was expanded upon a bit–on each stars’ sort of bio sheet, it lists their ‘likes,’ so adding ‘dislikes’ to that card might be a good way to implement that more clearly (of course, perhaps my star was just grumpy, and I’m reading into that too much). Another of these occurs after feeding the stars what I can only assume is too much candy. They stop working for a bit and simply smile slyly at the camera for several moments. Maybe they’re having a sugar high?

It’s clear that this game doesn’t take itself too seriously, and there are a lot of silly jokes and descriptions, which lend well to the lighthearted aura of the game. This does, however, mean that there are a few pieces of text that don’t make much sense, sacrificing some logic for humor, but the text is probably the least important part of this game, so I don’t think it loses too much with a few typos. While I think it could benefit from more in-depth tutorials and explanations, it seems to be a cute, goofy, and jaunty idle game, and I look forward to seeing the other mechanics that come after Early Access!

Check Out the MatchyGotchy Z Trailer:

MatchyGotchy Z is available for Windows PC for $5.99 via Steam Early Access.