Temtem

Temtem is a creature-collection MMO: it wears its Pokémon inspiration on its sleeve, but it's built from the ground up as a shared online world. Spanish studio Crema sends you across the Airborne Archipelago, a chain of six bright, floating islands, catching and training Temtem to build your squad.

Its biggest twist on the classic formula is 2-versus-2 turn-based combat. Instead of limited move points, every technique spends stamina: pushing your strongest attacks leaves you exposed, so each turn is a genuine decision. Add creature synergies —combos that only fire when two Temtem battle side by side— and the type system, and you get a fight with far more tactical depth than it first lets on.

And the whole map is a living world: you run into other players as you explore, you can play the entire campaign in co-op with a friend, and once the story ends an endgame of breeding, ranked battles and character and house customization takes over. That's the part that earns the MMO label — the single-player adventure is the starting point, not the ceiling.

Temtem is Buy to Play: you pay once, with no subscription and no passes. On Steam it runs around USD 44.99, with editions like the Deluxe and Ultimate Tamer adding cosmetics, plus bundles with Temtem: Swarm. The important thing about the model is what it no longer has: for years the game ran a premium currency (Novas), a cosmetics shop and a seasonal Tamer Pass, but Crema removed every microtransaction with patch 1.7 (June 2024). Today there are no extra payments, no passes and nothing pay-to-win — buy the game and you get all of its content.

The game is Live, though in maintenance mode. It launched its 1.0 on September 6, 2022 after two and a half years in early access, and in March 2024 Crema announced the end of new content: patches 1.7 and 1.8 (mid-2024) were the last major updates, with no new islands, Temtem or multiplayer additions. The studio still fixes bugs and tunes balance, and has said the servers will stay online for many years because they're cheap to run. The flip side is the population: it's thin —on the order of a couple thousand daily players across all platforms— even though the game has passed 2 million registered users. Crema, meanwhile, has moved on to other Temtem-universe projects (Swarm, Showdown, Pioneers).

Temtem is a natural home for anyone who ever wanted a genuine online Pokémon: the collecting, breeding and competitive battling are well realized, and the fact that it's a one-time purchase with no microtransactions makes it an honest, easy pick within its niche. The caveat is the usual one for a game in maintenance: don't expect new content or a massive crowd. If you want a creature-collector with an MMO's soul, self-contained and free of monetization traps, it delivers; if you need a constantly expanding world and full servers, this isn't that game anymore.