Guardians: Unite the Realms

The Guardians

About this game

Can you save the Guardians and their Realms?

There are many Realms other than ours, each with its own Guardian which has protected it for millenia. But now, evil Scorians have begun to trap the Guardians and have sent the creatures of these Realms into hiding. It's up to you to inspire the creatures to return and fight back against the villainous invaders! Unlike other games, the only way to collect pets is to do real life activities that are meaningful for you in order to inspire them to join you! Once you've inspired pets to join you, it's up to you to send them on missions to train them in skills they can use to fight back and retake their Realm!

Build a customized team of pets and send them on missions to train their various skills, while upgrading and customizing your own abilities. Be sure to collect useful items and cosmetic outfits to help your pets on their quest! You'll have to carefully manage your teams of pets in order to stop the Scorians and free the Guardians!

The Guardians is not only a game about collecting and training pets. It is a tool you can use to build the skills you need to fight depression and improve your wellbeing. Developed in the Affective Computing Group of the MIT Media Lab, The Guardians is a unique tool created using psychological techniques of mobile games to reward and encourage healthy habit formation and teach skills that are invaluable toward fighting depression. The best way to help the creatures of the Realms is to help yourself live the best life you can!

It's up to you to help the Guardians, your pets, and most importantly, yourself!

Ratings and reviews

Downloaded yesterday. Absolutely love the game play. Worked hard to get my 6pets leveled up had costumes for all and then some as well as I found 4 of the 30 stones/crystals. Shared my email for cloud save. I excitedly open app to play and all my gameplay is gone. Nothing has been saved. The game restarted but I just don't have have the heart to replay. Idk what happened or why so it seems likely to happen again. And I would love to play when all has been fixed. So until then

Self-care is generally not high on my list, but the Guardians makes it easy for me to translate my addictive lizard brain behavior of playing phone games all of the time into a reason to do something else. It's not forceful, but the reminder to spend time on myself is a welcome change from games that constantly want to take my money. The art and animations are amazingly cute, and the gameplay itself is engaging in the same way that many mobile games are.

The Guardians is an excellent app for kicking your brain into starting positive habits. The pets motivate me to keep going on "Adventures" (read: good self care). The dialogue and graphics are gold. Play it and find out! The biggest concerns I have with the game are the one mission/day limit and the lack of accessibility features. For example, I can't change the rest timer to a "night owl" mode for my night shift schedule. I would love to beta test new versions of the app if possible. Great job!

What's new

No gameplay changes.

Fixed a crash on startup in Android 14 by downgrading the target Android SDK to 33.

Upgraded Unity version a couple patches to better support new Android requirements.