Voidpets is a mobile app that is full of “creatures born from emotions” that you can catch and fight battles with, but what does this have to do with mental health? Great question — I have no clue.

Voidpets is a mental health game where you check in every day to track your mood and to collect different creatures based on emotions. After you collect the creatures you battle them against trainers or the open void to level them up and gain different attacks and foods. There are two parts to the game, the battling part, and the garden part.

In your garden you can plant trees and mushrooms and make them “vivid” versions of the normal tree … that means they change colors. The pets themselves are embodiments of different emotions such as the classic sadness, anger, boredom, glee and, of course, lust and wrath. They each have a different design and eye shape with them gaining more eyes as they evolve. 

Every pet can be named, evolved and trained to different levels. They all have types too: wood, fire, metal, water and earth. A vivid attribute can change the type and variant of a pet as well as the color. 

Although the colors are fun, as a mental health app, this was useless. It didn’t include goals or activities and it didn’t check up on you other than having you acknowledge what emotion you are feeling.

This game puts mental health in the description to get more people to download it, but doesn’t provide any  helpful resources. I would like to see some helpline numbers, what to do when having an anxiety attack, something. Anything. It did have my pets ask me how I was feeling on a scale of one to five every time I checked in on them, which got on my nerves after a bit. No, my emotions have not changed in the past five minutes, I’m not that sporadic, game!  

For all this app’s faults, I did enjoy playing the game. If you remove the mental health part of it entirely, the matches are fun and leveling up your pet is rewarding. I liked collecting all the vivid versions of the pets and discovering new emotions daily. 

But after a while of collecting them, the game said my storage was full.

Apparently there is a $60 a year subscription to get more spots to store your pets. For a “mental health” app that’s absurd. This app is fun as a silly little pet battle game, but it is not worth your money . 

Compared to the other mental health app I have, Finch, Voidpets is plain bad. Finch gives a very positive user interface with a lot of mental health resources — like breathing exercises and sending good vibes to friends. The main goal of Finch is to help you. Voidpets has the game first.

Even the game part of Voidpets gets repetitive after a while. The fun of collecting the pets is squashed by the pet limit. The trainers are all the same except for you getting more moves and higher health.  The store only has one item a day with no way to reroll the options.

For a so-called mental health app it caused more frustration than it helped with. From the subscription, to the pestering “how are you feeling today?” and the limited pet space, it is a useless app.  Unless you just want to collect the voidpets, do not get this game.

2 out of 5 stars on gameplay and 1 out of 5 for enjoyability.