TaskPals

TaskPals is honest about what it is, even if some of its buyers wish it were something else. There's no score, no objective, no ending — you pick a handful of eight-bit pixel animals from a roster of eight (more if you dig into Steam Workshop), set them loose to wander your taskbar, and decide whether you want them "friendly," meaning you can click and pet them, or "annoyed," meaning they'll skitter away from your cursor and generally stay out from underfoot while you work. One of the more thoughtful negative reviews in the corpus makes the case bluntly: this isn't a game, it's a piece of software in the tradition of old desktop companions like Bonzi Buddy, and judging it as a game misses the point. That's a fair framing, and it's the one this review uses — the question isn't whether TaskPals has good level design, it's whether it does the one thing it sets out to do, reliably, without causing problems.

What actually happened with the "virus"

The single largest cloud over this app's reputation traces back to a specific six-week window in mid-2023. Starting around 27 July that year, Microsoft Defender began flagging TaskPals as containing "CryptInject," a trojan-family detection, and a wave of Steam reviews followed — some genuinely alarmed, some just reporting what their antivirus told them. Counting the app's full negative-review history turns up 23 mentions of "virus," "trojan" or "malware" out of 61 English-language negatives, which sounds damning until you date them: 14 of those 23 are clustered in that same 2023 window, tapering to 7 in 2024 and just one each in 2025 and 2026.

What separates this from an unresolved accusation is that the developer's own news feed documents the whole episode in detail, in real time. A 27 July 2023 post explains the situation plainly — "there is absolutely no virus or anything malicious in this application" — and says a submission is already in with Microsoft. A follow-up on 24 August admits the first attempt failed and the app was flagged again after an automated resubmission process. A third post on 12 September, titled "UPDATE regarding False-positive virus detection," delivers what it calls "BIG (GOOD) NEWS": the flag was resolved. That's three separate public updates over seven weeks on what could have been a launch-killing crisis for a one-person project, and the review data backs up that it worked — the complaint essentially disappears from the corpus afterward. A review corpus can't audit a Windows binary, and this review doesn't try to, but the shape of the evidence — a tight cluster of complaints matching a documented, developer-acknowledged incident, followed by a steep drop-off — is exactly what a resolved false positive looks like rather than an ongoing problem.

A smaller complaint that hasn't fully gone away

Separately from the virus scare, a thinner but more persistent thread runs through the reviews: TaskPals, or a leftover taskbar icon from it, sometimes doesn't disappear cleanly after being uninstalled or disabled. Unlike the malware complaints, this one doesn't cluster in a single window — it shows up at a low, steady rate from 2023 through mid-2026, including in the 100 most recent English reviews sampled for this review. It's a much smaller share of the negative corpus than the 2023 incident, and nowhere near severe enough to read as malicious behaviour, but it's a real usability complaint that outlasted the crisis that made headlines, and buyers weighing whether to install a background app should know it exists.

The part that's actually working

Set the two complaints above to one side and what's left is a small, well-tended project. The pal-management panel is clean and legible — a pet portrait with speed and scale sliders, a scrollable grid of the available roster, and dedicated buttons for Settings, Workshop and Create a Pal, all laid out without clutter. The January 2025 update was a genuine expansion rather than a maintenance patch: Steam Workshop integration lets players download community-made pets or build their own directly in the app, and multi-monitor support addressed one of the more obvious limitations of an earlier version. A May 2025 hotfix specifically targeting settings and display bugs suggests the developer is still actively triaging reports rather than treating the app as finished.

The pricing history is worth a plain accounting rather than a verdict. TaskPals launched free in May 2023, sold optional DLC packs alongside it for a while, and on 8 November 2024 switched to a straightforward NZ$4.49 one-time purchase with every previously separate DLC folded into that single price — while explicitly grandfathering in anyone who'd already claimed it for free. Some reviewers still call the change "scummy" on principle, and that reaction is understandable for anyone who liked getting it for nothing. Judged as a transaction on its own terms, though, a single NZ$4.49 charge that replaced a pack of separate DLC purchases is a fair trade, not a bait-and-switch.

Final verdict

TaskPals is a small, honestly-scoped piece of software that had a genuinely bad six weeks in the summer of 2023 and has spent the three years since proving that scare wasn't representative — a documented false-positive antivirus flag, three public updates working through it with Microsoft, and a steady drip of real feature work since, including Workshop support that meaningfully extends what was originally a fixed eight-pet roster. It isn't a game and doesn't pretend to be one, and a persistent minority complaint about the app lingering after uninstall keeps it from an easy recommendation to anyone who values a completely frictionless remove. For anyone who likes the idea of a pixel pet quietly living on their taskbar and is willing to read the 2023 incident as the dated, resolved story the developer's own timeline shows it to be, it's a cheap, well-supported little piece of desktop charm.