My Talking Tom

My Talking Tom is built on a simple but extremely addictive principle — the virtual cat Tom repeats words recorded in your own voice in a comically sped-up or slowed-down form, and the player also has to take care of him like a real pet: feeding him by tapping on food, petting him by swiping a finger across the screen, putting him to bed, or playing with him in small minigames scattered around the apartment.

The game was released in 2013 by the Croatian-Cypriot studio Outfit7 as part of the expanding Talking Tom series, which started as an app without much of a game layer and gradually turned into a full-fledged virtual pet simulator with its own economy of coins and diamonds. The game is free to download but relies on ads between activities and in-app purchases of virtual currency, which can be spent on clothes, furniture for the apartment, or speeding up progress — a model that most similar pet simulators have copied ever since. The huge commercial success of My Talking Tom in particular helped build Outfit7 into one of the largest mobile game studios in the world, and it also became the springboard for the follow-up animated series Talking Tom and Friends.

Simple, colorful graphics and exaggeratedly comic cat animations make the game accessible even to the youngest children, which was the main target audience from the very start.

Why play it: Parents of young children looking for harmless entertainment for a few minutes will find the game suitable, but they need to expect ads and pressure toward in-app purchases, which are an almost inseparable part of the experience in this series.