Play Spectrobes Online

Game Overview

Spectrobes is one of those weirdly charming DS games that makes you feel like a space archaeologist with a team of pocket monsters. You start off as Rallen or Jeena, two patrol officers who stumble onto an ancient pod—turns out some planet-eating aliens called the Krawl are on the loose, and the only way to stop them is by reviving these extinct creatures called Spectrobes.

Digging up fossils is oddly satisfying—you tap away at the touchscreen to chip off layers of dirt, trying not to crack the fossil inside. Then you’ve gotta wake them up by yelling into the DS mic (yes, really) or blowing on it like an old NES cartridge. The Spectrobes themselves are these cool little elemental creatures that evolve as you feed them minerals you find while digging.

Battles are real-time brawls where you command two Spectrobes at once, mixing their attacks with button combos. The Krawl show up as these swirling vortexes on planets, and if you get too close, you’re thrown into a fight. There’s also this bizarre but fun feature where you can scan physical cards with holes in them to unlock extra Spectrobes—very early-2000s gimmicky, but it works.

It’s got that classic monster-collecting hook, but with a sci-fi twist and some genuinely creative uses of the DS hardware.