[h1][b]My Little Spider[/b][/h1]
[h3][b]Time Played:[/b][/h3]
12.3 Hours
[h3][b]Last Played:[/b][/h3]
7th of August, 2026
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Since I was both intrigued and have never played what I've started calling “Overlay games”, I went into this with the hope I would break the Curse of Dour-Dismissal.
Not quite.
[h3][b]Yay:[/b][/h3]
+ I rather enjoyed the artwork.
+ Multiple Trinkets...
+ ...Spider skins...
+ ...Hats...
+ ...Upgrades...
+ ...and insects to see, and unlock.
+ The fact the web changes appearance depending where on the screen you put it amused me.
+ Finding new bugs was always exciting to me.
[h3][b]Meh:[/b][/h3]
~ You need to toggle “Always on Top” off if you want to be able to have the taskbar pop up, should you have it set to “Auto hide” in Windows.
[h3][b]Nay:[/b][/h3]
- Luck-based achievements.
- The Spider can sleep, which seems to serve no purpose outside of guaranteeing some bugs escape the web, throttling your monetary gains as artificially as possible.
- Most of the “Active” items seemed only-slightly worth the price of unlock, or acquisition, given they're all temporary, timed things whose full effects can be permanently-had by waiting a touch longer than you would if you'd used them. Seeing as the only one I deemed useful needed to be constantly-watched, and repurchased, equating to busy work, I'd have much-preferred if trinkets weren't purely-decorative, and granted stat boosts.
- You can also only have one active at a time, when up to 3 trinkets can be put on the web at-once.
- Finally, for this tangent, no achievement exists for having an amount of small-size bugs in your box at-once, making the “decrease size of insect by 10% on average” a re-skin of the “make everything bigger” one.
- The game never tells you multiple things can be done, like clicking the bundles on bugs to wrap them faster/boost the wrapping power. I thought this was the game bugging out, and displaying the web wraps of the spider in the wrong position.
- In addition, what some of the nebulously-named options do is withheld from the player. For instance, the “Flying Bugs”option seemed to do absolutely nothing, most insects being airborne variants even when set to “Rare”.
- Keeping on the under-explanation train, things other than bugs can get lodged in the web, and clicking them elicits a “Thanks!” from the spider, but neither the presence, nor removal of these objects seems to do anything more.
- Accidentally-mousing over the spider freezes it, delaying catches.
- Clicking the spider, which is the only way to bring up the HUD when it's hidden, also does this.
- Setting Eat Priority to “Rarest” still saw the spider passing up 3 star, worth-29-coins bugs in the web for a 1 star, worth-2-coins one.
- Given some of the achievements require you to have certain bugs in your box, a “lock” button to prevent the needed insects from being sold would have been deeply-appreciated.
- Having an in-game clock that indicates when certain bugs can spawn seemed to me like yet another way to inflate one's play time without reason.
- The total amount of bugs shown when discovering a new one is “62”, yet the guide book shows “61”, and the final Pioneer achievement unlocks at 60. I've thus 0 clue if the total on the discovery pane is incorrect, and lists one more insect than what's present in-game, or if the book is wrong, and I completely-missed a 62nd arthropod.
- Other than putting the spider icon on the relevant world-map's location, labelling the area on the HUD, altering what non-living object can get lodged in the web, and changing the types of arthropods that can be stuck in the map, nothing else changes when switching areas. The presentation of the game itself would have been more-enjoyed by me if, say, the HUD icons, and window backgrounds changed to the theme of the area.
- Most of the trinkets, and Spider Skins are also locked behind luck-based quests, which meant I didn't even unlock half of them. No they're not stat boosters, but I'd have at-least liked to see them all.
[hr]
[h3][b]Verdict:[/b][/h3]
Great though the start of “opening a box that contained a trinket of Lone Fungus's protagonist, another with a Microsoft Clippy spider, and finally, getting an achievement called “Wowza”, on discovering my first insect” may have been, that was a very short burst of joy that phased into frustration, then almost complete apathy.
Several of the elements either seemingly did nothing, or otherwise only served to needlessly-lengthen the experience, with multiple errors being present in multiple locations. Thus, while the concept was endearing to me, I thought it failed to fully-realise its potential.
[h3][b]Placed in:[/b][/h3]
5: Dourly-Dismissed.
