WonderPaws, the open-world Animal Crossing where you are a furry

Cat Paw Latte has announced WonderPaws, a free-to-play life sim set in an entire city built by animals. The announcement has gone viral on X, and the trailer is close to 90,000 views in a single day between the IGN and GameTrailers channels. It is also coming to PC and mobile, and pre-registration is already open.

The announcement landed on 25 September and the Animal Crossing comparison came instantly. It is the first thing that springs to mind for anyone who likes life sims. Although, as you will see, the game goes off in quite a different direction.

• Title: WonderPaws
• Developer: Cat Paw Latte
• Publisher: Farlight Games
• Genre: Casual life sim and RPG
• Platforms: PC (Steam), iOS and Android
• Release date: To be confirmed

What WonderPaws is

You arrive in Paw City as the only human being in a city built by anthropomorphic animals called Paw Pals. Everything is designed to their measurements, with their sizes and their habits, so the skyscrapers and the neon-lit streets are built for a raccoon or a cat, not for humans.

After that, you build whatever life you want. You share a flat with several Paw Pals, decorate the house, look for work and chase whatever you fancy, because you can end up as a star, as the mayor or as a designer. And if you get tired of being the odd one out, the game lets you turn into a Paw Pal and try the other side. This is what has surprised the community most, because we can deliberately turn ourselves into a furry.

In addition, it will be multiplayer, open world and third person, with a very clean cartoon 3D look. It is developed by Cat Paw Latte and published by Farlight Games, although the specialist press suggests the studio belongs to Lilith Games, the company behind Rise of Kingdoms and AFK Arena.

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What sets it apart from other life sims

The announcement has spread above all on Twitter, now known as X. In fact, the trailer has been shared non-stop since day one. I have given it a fair bit of thought and I reckon there are four reasons that explain it:

• It fills a gap Nintendo does not cover. Animal Crossing is tied to the Nintendo Switch and comes out once in a blue moon. A game with that same fantasy, on PC and mobile, free and open world, points straight at everyone who has been waiting since 2020 for something similar and has not found it.
• It is not a copy. Almost every Animal Crossing clone (Disney Dreamlight Valley, Hello Kitty Island Adventure, Heartopia or Petit Planet) tends to share the same foundation of a cosy island or village. WonderPaws offers a big city with skyscrapers and neon.
• Being one of them is the hook. Turning into a Paw Pal is the line repeated in every piece of coverage to set the game apart from its rivals. It takes two seconds to understand and it invites you to show it on video, because announcements that spread on their own nearly always have an idea that specific.
• And on top of that it is free. There is no barrier to entry, so trying it does not commit you to anything. That multiplies the reach of any video showing it, because whoever watches can go and sign up right then. The downside is that it will probably come with microtransactions, as we have already seen in similar ”free” offerings.

A quick look at the WonderPaws trailer

The trailer opens by showing us some humanoid animals singing and dancing as if they were idols. So I suspect there will be different jobs we can take on around the city. There are also scenes of the main character serving in an ice cream shop or delivering orders to people’s homes, so it looks like there will be all kinds of work.

After that, the whole city has a futuristic, modern look that I love. We see enormous buildings, technology on giant screens, futuristic houses… but surrounded by nature, creating a gorgeous contrast we do not usually get in this kind of game.

They have made clear that we will be able to customise our house and that there will be a fairly wide freedom of decoration. For example, we will be able to place furniture as we please, change walls and floors and edit our character’s appearance. Quite important in a multiplayer game where expressing yourself is the whole point.

Something I am especially excited about is the huge variety of events and interactions, both with the city’s residents and with other players. This is the weakest point of the recent Animal Crossing games, which focus mainly on decoration, both outside on the island and inside the house. Above all, I really miss feeling that relationships with the animals are more organic. By the looks of it, in WonderPaws these NPCs have much stronger personalities and react to our actions in livelier ways. One example shows up in this screenshot, where we see ourselves celebrating our birthday in company.

At the end of the trailer they reveal how we can turn into furries. It looks like we will have to drink some sort of magic potion to go from human to animal. Even so, I wonder whether it is temporary and whether it has any other function in the gameplay beyond being cosmetic.

How free will it really be?

Being free is exactly what makes it so shareable, but it also raises questions. The usual model in these cases is daily challenges, season passes and gacha pulls, forcing the player to log in every day so as not to miss anything. That is something I find quite tiresome. Instead, I would rather pay for the game once and have it complete, with its story and its quests finished.

That clashes head-on with the reason people play a cozy game. After all, we like going at our own pace with nobody rushing us. The studio has still not spelled out how it plans to monetise it, so that is the question to ask as soon as the playtests open.

When WonderPaws comes out and how to sign up

On Steam the date is listed as to be confirmed. Meanwhile, the press points to 2027, and for now pre-registration is open on the official website with playtests planned further down the line.

If you are interested, you can add WonderPaws to your Steam wishlist so you hear about it as soon as they open a test.