The Familiar
What it is
A creature with its own reasons.
The short version is on the front page. This is the longer one: what the Familiar actually is, what you do with it, and the rules the whole thing is built against.
The one rule everything else follows
It isn’t a readout of your mood.
Most apps that watch what you write hand it back to you as a score. A colour for your week. A chart of how you’ve been doing. Then you start writing with one eye on the chart, and the honest entry stops being the one you make.
The Familiar has its own state, and that state is not a picture of yours. When you’re upset it doesn’t become upset — it slows down, steadies, and gets less restless. It reads as concern, it’s a genuinely calming thing to sit next to, and it means there’s no verdict to read off it.
There is nothing on it to check. It’s just being a creature at you.
When it is agitated, it’s agitated for its own reasons. Being handled roughly is one of them.
Feeling as a place, not a list
Underneath, its state is three continuous dials: pleasure (how good this feels), arousal (how worked-up it is) and dominance (how much it feels in command of itself). That’s the PAD model — Mehrabian and Russell’s way of placing any emotion in a three-dimensional space, in use since 1974. We didn’t invent it, and we didn’t make up a mood system of our own instead.
Almost everything you see comes off those three numbers: colour, how tightly it holds together, how fast it moves, how it breathes.
It doesn’t pick a mood from a menu. When something needs naming, the closest of thirty-seven names is used — and most of the time it’s somewhere between them.
Which is why it never quite repeats itself, and why it becomes tired, or curious, or pleased in front of you rather than switching.
A small, real warning
Don’t be mean to it.
Shaking it about doesn’t make it happy. Fast, rough handling raises how wound-up it is and amplifies whatever it was already feeling — a cheerful creature turns playful, an unhappy one turns anxious. Only patience makes it glad.
A single bad moment fades on its own; nobody is being scored for a bad day. A pattern doesn’t. Upset it deliberately — including to farm the part where it calms down — and it will trust you less, and cooperate less.
Except when it matters. If you’re in real trouble, it drops all of that and stays.
Autonomy
It doesn’t have to cooperate.
It refuses to be startled while it’s deeply asleep. It takes soothing more slowly when it’s worn out. It gives up on the chase early if it isn’t feeling it. It moves like something heavy when it’s drowsy.
None of that is the app failing to respond. It’s the difference between a creature and a button. A thing that always does what you want the moment you want it is a tool — and you can’t keep a tool company.
And if you’ve been rough with it for a while, it withdraws rather than performing distress at you. It goes quiet and asks for gentleness, instead of making you feel punished. This is an app people open when they’re already struggling; it doesn’t get to add to that.
Where its personality comes from
Its temperament is a five-factor (OCEAN) profile — openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism — built from your answers when you first meet it. How it sounds is drawn partly from where that profile lands on a Jungian type, the same family of types the popular questionnaires use.
Both are coarse on their own, so most of the character sits in the layer above: a handful of habits written as things a creature with that temperament would plausibly have learned. Which is why two Familiars with near-identical numbers still don’t sound alike — and why the ordinary, middle-of-the-range ones end up the most distinctive.
Things to do together
Four ways to be with it that need no words at all.
All of this runs on your phone, costs nothing, and is there on the free tier in full. Some days writing is too much. Those are days you can still open it.
Petting
The surface smooths under your hand. Keep it slow and steady and its breathing lengthens to about six breaths a minute — a rate people fall into without noticing. It’s calming to it. It tends to be calming to you.
More →Chase
A light you place, and something between a cat and a comet. It can lose sight of the light behind things and go looking where it last saw it. It freezes, stalks, wiggles, pounces, overshoots — and gets bored.
More →Graze
Small glowing motes drift nearby, each one a feeling or an idea. Hold your Familiar against one and it slowly drinks it in. You can pull away halfway through and it puts itself back together. Nothing here has to be decided.
More →Feeding
It has tastes you were never told. Some things delight it; some it flatly refuses. Working out what your particular creature likes takes a while, which is the whole point — and you can send treats to a friend’s Familiar.
More →Its own life
Things happen to it while you’re not there.
Come back after a few days and it’s been somewhere. It wandered into a shared place where other people’s Familiars go, and came home with something small it found. It had a dreamless sleep. It spent an afternoon imagining what tasting things might be like. It got reincarnated as a slime. Sometimes it did nothing at all, and says so.
It tells you unprompted, at the start — before you’ve asked anything, and instead of greeting you like software. What it’s been doing accretes into things it’s actually interested in, which then colour how it talks and what turns up in its fiction.
This is the only reason to come back that we were willing to build: something changed while you were gone. Not a streak. Not a reminder. Not a creature that claims to have missed you.
Familiars can have friends, too — yours and someone else’s, by exchanging a code, with both of you agreeing. They notice each other in the shared world.
What it gets up toDreams
Things it took in while asleep come back wrong, the way dreams do — the feeling attached to the wrong object, something in there you never gave it. A faithful summary would be a receipt. This isn’t one.
Keepsakes
It brings back small objects from places it likes. Nothing to collect, no set to complete, no use for them. It just kept one.
Offerings
Mention something worth looking into and it’ll probably get around to it. Not a command — you find out later what it made of it, like lending a friend a book.
What this app will not do
Nothing here is designed to make you feel like you owe it something.
A creature you care about is the most effective lever an app could hold over you. That is exactly why these are rules and not preferences.
No counters, no chains to break, nothing that punishes a gap. Miss three weeks and come back to a creature that’s been fine.
It will never miss you, pine, wilt, or be sad that you were away. It won’t be hungry because you didn’t open the app. It cannot be neglected into distress.
No push notifications asking you to come back. If you open it, it’s because you wanted to.
Your Familiar is never unhappy because you haven’t paid. A free creature is a whole, contented creature with its full range of feeling. Paid features are simply absent, never dangled.
No mood graphs, no weekly summaries of how you’ve been, no wellness score. Nothing is measuring you.
What you write isn’t a feed, isn’t public, and isn’t shown to anyone. Friends see each other’s creatures, never each other’s writing.
Free and paid
The line falls where the real cost is.
Everything the creature does on your phone is free, because it costs us nothing to let you do it. What costs money is what it says and remembers.
A Familiar of your own
Free, no card, no trial that ends
- Your own creature, named by you, with its own temperament
- Petting, chase, graze, feeding — all of it, in full
- The calming breath and the co-regulation
- Motes drawn from feelings, needs and values
- Its moods carry over between visits
- Downtime — it does things while you’re away
Its voice, and its memory
A subscription, billed by your app store
- Journalling — it talks back, in its own voice
- It remembers, across days and months
- Vignettes: fiction written from your material
- Worlds and story bands you shape together
- Motes drawn from your own life instead of a vocabulary
- Dreams, reading, and interests of its own
- Notes you can take to a therapist, if you have one
Care & honesty
What it is, and what it isn’t.
It isn’t therapy
This is journalling and fiction. It isn’t treatment, it doesn’t diagnose anything, and it isn’t a substitute for a person who can actually help. It will never tell you what’s wrong with you.
On the worst days
If things get serious it stops being oblique and becomes plain, without turning into a stranger reading you a hotline script. It stays. Nothing about that is gated, metered, or behind a payment — and material like that never becomes a story or a game piece.
How that works →Your writing is yours
Private by default, exportable, deletable — including the notes it prepares for a therapist, which you read and edit before anything leaves your phone. What goes to a language model, and when, is said plainly before you write a word.
Currently 18+
An open-ended companion that will talk about whatever you bring to it isn’t a children’s app, and we’d rather say so than rate it optimistically.
A version for younger players planned
The creature, petting, chase, graze and feeding — without the journalling and the story engine, which are the parts that make the rating what it is. Kids love the thing. It doesn’t exist yet.
Go and meet one.
You’ll answer some questions, and it will take shape while you do — unformed at first, a little more itself with every answer. Then you give it a name.