Iawase: Cozy Idle Monster Game

Shake a tree and the fruit comes tumbling down. Your little monsters wander over, munch away, and grow a bit with every bite, until one day they change shape. A slow, quiet idle game on a tiny planet, and one of your very first eggs is a dragon.

■ Shake, feed, grow
Tap the screen and the trees nearby shake loose their fruit. Keep tapping and more falls, until the last tap brings down a big bundle. Whoever is hungry comes to eat first, and every bite earns sparkles and experience. Now and then a golden fruit ripens, worth five times the sparkles.

■ From egg to stage ten, forty-three families
A creature hatches at stage two, grows up at stage six and can fly, and reaches its final form at stage ten. The field guide holds forty-three families of ten stages each, plus the shape-born creatures: dragons, jellyfish, mushrooms, penguins, robots and more. Anything you have not seen yet stays a silhouette. Every one of them is a voxel creature made for this game.

■ Where eggs come from
Once your own companion reaches stage six, bump into a stage-ten friend a few times and an egg appears. Which pair brings which family is fixed, so finding the right pairs is part of the fun. Every two days, a new egg may also drop onto your planet by itself. Build a house, a gate or a tower and warm an egg beside it, and it hatches into a creature of that shape (once for each shape).

■ While you are away, the trees fill up
When the app is closed your companions wait instead of eating, and the fruit keeps ripening on the trees, up to eight hours' worth. Come back and shake the heavy branches to collect it all. You get a notification when the trees are full.

■ Fever
Watch one ad for a thirty-minute fever: fruit ripens twice as fast and sparkles are doubled. Fevers stack up to four hours and keep working while you are away. On the new planet, that is the only place ads appear. No banners, no ads that interrupt you, and nothing to buy.

■ A planet that grows
Spend sparkles to plant more trees, make the food tastier, and make the planet itself bigger, seven sizes in all. As it grows, newly planted trees bear fruit, then bread, then sweets, and finally sushi.

■ Build with blocks
Place blocks in the eight colors of your companion's element, plus twenty-two props such as benches and lanterns. Shapes you build are added to the buildings page of your field guide.

■ Meet someone by chance
The planets of people playing at the same moment show up in your sky. You can meet people playing on iPhone, too. Stand side by side on the same planet with both companions grown up, and a heart appears: each of you gets the same egg at your feet. Three families are born only this way. If someone is being a nuisance, you can report and block them right there.

■ There is always someone's planet
Planets built by other players float in your sky too. Even when they are not playing, you can land and look around. Pick a greeting and leave a footprint, and the next time the owner plays, they will know someone dropped by.

■ Your old planet, too
The earlier block-building planet, with its animal residents and expeditions, can still be chosen anytime under Settings > Planet to play. Neither save is ever erased.

■ Easy on the eyes
No fast full-screen flashing. Turn on Gentle effects in Settings to tone down light and shaking even further.