Aniimo has a date, and it is closer than most people expected. Pawprint Studio confirmed at Gamescom that its free-to-play open-world creature collector launches on September 16, 2026 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC - with iOS and Android following one week later on September 23.
The staggered rollout is worth flagging up front if you are planning to play on a phone. Aniimo is cross-platform with shared progression, so the practical effect of the split is that the mobile audience joins a world that has already been running for seven days. Whether that matters depends on how the launch events are structured - the game has run two betas already and neither made its live-ops cadence entirely clear.
The twist is that you play as the monster
The comparison everybody reaches for is Pokemon, and the surface reading supports it: you build a party of creatures, you explore a large open world, you fight other trainers. Aniimo's actual hook is a mechanic the studio calls Twining, and it inverts the usual arrangement. Rather than issuing commands from the sidelines, you take direct control of your Aniimo - in combat, and out in the world for traversal and puzzle-solving.
That single decision changes the genre it belongs to. A creature collector where the creatures are playable characters is an action game with a roster, not a turn-based RPG with a bestiary, and it explains why the open world is built the way it is - with terrain that reads as puzzle geometry rather than as corridors between battles.
Free-to-play, and the first thing FunPlus has published under this label
Aniimo is the debut project from Pawprint Studio, a publishing label FunPlus set up specifically for it. That is relevant context for a free-to-play game: it is a new label trying to establish a reputation, on a launch that runs simultaneously on console, PC and mobile, against the most entrenched franchise in the category.
Pre-orders are live on PlayStation and Xbox with platform-exclusive rewards and skins. The PC release covers Steam and the Epic Games Store.
What to watch
The two open questions are the ones every cross-platform free-to-play launch faces. The first is monetisation - nothing announced so far has spelled out how the roster is acquired or what a gacha layer, if there is one, would look like. The second is parity: an open world that runs on PS5 and on a mid-range Android phone is a real engineering problem, and the betas ran on a narrower device pool than a global launch will.
Neither is a reason for scepticism yet. But September 16 is three weeks out, and the answers have not arrived.
