VPet-Simulator

The two most-upvoted positive reviews of VPet-Simulator, at 888 and 656 votes, are both jokes about the game being spyware. The most-upvoted negative, at 109 votes, is not joking — and it also contains the solution.

This one needs untangling carefully, because "is this thing safe" is the only question that matters for software that runs on your desktop all day, and the review page gives a confusing answer.

What the accusations actually say

Seventeen of the hundred most-helpful English negatives use words like malware, virus, keylogger, spyware or crypto mining. Some are unambiguous: "This game is 100% Malware. It keeps trying to reinstall itself. Also, I'm pretty sure it's using our computers for bitcoin mining."

Read them together and almost all of them share a single observation underneath: after uninstalling, Windows kept prompting to install it again. That's the concrete, repeatedly-described behaviour. The mining and keylogging are inferences drawn from it, offered without evidence.

And the top negative, at 109 votes, diagnoses it in its own update: "just press WINDOWS KEY+R and type shell:startup and delete the VPET file." That's a leftover startup shortcut — an uninstaller that didn't clean up after itself. Annoying, sloppy, and roughly the least sinister explanation available.

Dating it, which settles most of it

Counting isn't enough here, so I dated every report.

• **Reinstall and startup complaints: 12 in total, seven in 2023 and five in 2024. None in 2025 or

2026, and none in the hundred most recent English reviews.**

• Malware-type accusations: 17 in total — eight in 2023, eight in 2024, one in 2025. Two appear

in the recent window, in a corpus where the two top-voted positives are jokes on exactly this theme.

So the concrete bug is fixed and the accusations tracking it have stopped. That's the honest picture.

I want to be equally clear about the limit of what I can say: I have not audited this software and a review corpus cannot audit a binary — the same caveat this library applied to Bongo Cat. What's different here is that VPet-Simulator is open source, published as such on its store page. Source being public doesn't guarantee the shipped build matches it, but it's a materially stronger position than an unauditable closed binary, and it's worth weighing.

The 84% you can't read

Now the other thing the badge hides. Of 51,500 reviews, 43,032 are Simplified Chinese — 84% of the total — sitting at 98.7% positive. English accounts for 3,672 at 95.3%.

That isn't a criticism of anyone, but it changes what the score means for an English-speaking reader: the overwhelming approval is coming from an audience playing a game made in their language, by a developer posting Lunar New Year, Dragon Boat and Mid-Autumn announcements. The English slice is smaller, three points cooler, and its most common substantive complaint is precisely that — translation and English-language polish, which appears in 14 of a hundred negatives.

One related note for prospective installers: the pet addresses the player as "master", and a 29-vote reviewer objects to the English localisation's phrasing on those grounds. Whether the character's tone and presentation appeal is a matter of taste rather than quality, but it's worth looking at the store page art before you install something that will sit on your screen all day.

What it's actually like

Good, and generous. The pet wanders across your open windows, sleeps, gets hungry, and can be fed and dressed. It supports Steam Workshop mods and ships a ModMaker tool, and the community has produced a lot — mods and Workshop appear in 14 of a hundred negatives, mostly from people wanting more of them.

Support is steady: a v1.10.57 Halloween update in October 2025 adding transparency adjustment and a photo gallery, New Year and festival events, and an anniversary update each August.

Complaints that remain are ordinary: multi-monitor and fullscreen behaviour in 9 of a hundred, and general bugginess in 8. Negatives by year run 41, 31, 18, 10 — a clean decline. Recent English reviews are 94 of 100 positive.

The verdict

VPet-Simulator earns a 7.5. It's free, open source, deeply moddable, actively maintained and genuinely charming — a better-supported desktop companion than most paid ones, including some reviewed in this library.

It doesn't score higher because the English-language side of it is visibly the secondary concern: translation quality is the top substantive complaint, multi-monitor handling is unreliable, and the uninstall bug that generated years of malware accusations should never have shipped in the first place.

But the scary reviews are dated, explicable and fixed. If a small animated companion on your desktop sounds pleasant, this is the most generous version of that idea available — and unlike most, you can read its source.