Amaru: Self-care Virtual Pet 9+

love the journal!!

I have used so many apps to try and help myself keep up with small wellness or self-care tasks and have ended up ignoring them or not enjoying them after a while, especially because of many of them flooding me with requests to make a purchase or putting so many things behind a paywall I can’t afford to get over. I was blessed enough to be donated a Golden Key that unlocks everything in the base game. This is an amazing little program that allows players to donate these keys to players like me who cannot afford them. I plan on donating when I’m more financially stable; I am so surprised that I only waited about 2 days until someone kind donated, so I would love to do the same. I wish other apps did that!

I absolutely love the gratitude journals and have that set as one of my daily goals. I love the art in this app; it is clear that a lot of love has been poured into this! i recommend this app for people who are looking for a basic way to promote a little bit of self-care in their lives. Having three goals each day is manageable and realistic—I have felt positive changes after journaling with this app. I love the burn journal the most. The animation is really fun when you are all done writing out your anger and it gets “burned.” So many small, intentional artistic choices are made in the animations that make this app so so special.

Helping me get back on track!

I used to be good with self care goals in the past without the help of apps but then in recent years, fell out of those habits…. I decided to give Amaru a try considering I really love cats and his design is quite adorable. I did try this a few months back and fell out of it due to personal things going on at the time but almost 2 weeks ago, I redownloaded it and have been using it religiously ever since. Truthfully I don’t use the meditations or journals since I use a different journaling app for that but I do like how they’re an option for those who can benefit from them. I love playing puzzle parlor and I pretty much already got most of the collections in each region thanks to how much I been playing and sending Amaru out to explore! After a lot of thought, I even bought the “all the things” purchase so I could play the full game and have all the puzzles and whatnot. It’s really been worth the investment and time and I’m really grateful for this little guy helping me get my life back on track and making me hold myself accountable once more! Awesome job to the team and I hope y’all continue to roll out even more features!

Actually amazing

My one quarrel is that there’s a lot of content locked behind a pay wall, which really isn’t much of a quarrel. I’m just mad I don’t have the money to pay for a subscription, but I am sure the content locked away is very valuable to the maintenance of mental health. I’m also sure the money is used to pay artists, composers, and anyone on a team to help maintain the app and anyone who’s worked on it.
Without paying, the app is still very useful and genuinely helps to form healthy practices such as grounding, reducing time on your phone, and mindfulness. I’ve found myself using this app every single time I fall into a depressive hole and it’s genuinely helped me every single time. Don’t get me wrong, meditation and a cute animal hybrid isn’t a cure all for depression. I’m currently looking into medications as well as other coping mechanisms and grounding techniques, but personally, meditation does help. It’s helped reduce a lot of stress from school and helped me wind down before bed.

I highly recommend this app for intro to guided meditation and other meditation techniques and uses. The journaling is alright as well though I wish there was a blank version without the “I’m grateful for” prompt. Sometimes I just want to write how I’m feeling and don’t need the be reminded of something to be grateful for.

Developer Response ,

We're so happy to hear it's been helping you! Yes, we wish we didn't have to paywall things either, but unfortunately it costs ~$30,000/month to run the studio and we haven't yet found a way to break even. Hoping that changes for us soon. We have put all the self-care content, the meditations, journal, etc. on the free side of the paywall to try and keep it accessible. We've finally got text entry feeling better in the journal, so we're looking forward to releasing more journal features soon.