Overview: Faunasphere is an adventure game with major pet-raising elements, or perhaps a pet-raising game with adventure elements. It’s a deep game with quite a bit to do on both sides, and it’s clearly up to the standards of a big shop like Big Fish.

You pick your first Fauna from a very limited list, with a small range of customizations, but never fear. There are quite a few different animal types and a large number of customizations eventually available. You access these customizations by getting “gene food” that gives your Fauna different kinds of genes, and hatching eggs to combine and maybe mutate the traits. It’s a fairly complex system, and getting all the customizations is a good reason to go adventuring.

Not that the adventures aren’t interesting in themselves. There are a number of areas, each with shops, special features, and Goals – quests that guide you through the areas and get you all sorts of goodies. The enemies are inanimate heaps of pollution and nasty squidgy blocks of gunk with tentacles that shoot green gases at your Fauna if they get too close, and many of the Goals involve clearing out some of this pollution with your magic collar. This takes energy, and getting gassed depletes your happiness, but both these can be recharged with the various items you find from exploring and cleaning up pollution. Faunasphere is unusual in that it doesn’t really limit your playtime – you can keep going for as long as you like, as long as you remember to let your Fauna eat and nap periodically.

Some of the rewards for adventuring are island customization items – from trees and flowers to water, dirt, and grass tiles to expand your island. New “world blocks” are fairly plentiful, giving you plenty of space to expand and decorate. With time and effort, you can build an island fully as detailed as any of the adventure areas.

The other unique thing about Faunasphere is that it’s also a web game – you can go to faunasphere.com and sign up there and play in the same world with the same people – just with not quite as many chances to show off to your friends. The real-money options are also slightly different – in the Facebook version, you can pay for more slots for Fauna or buy Bux with Facebook credits, and in the web version, you can pay varying amounts monthly to get a Bux stipend and Fauna slots.

Faunasphere is very deep for a Facebook game – and respectable for a web game, in fact. The balance of pet management and breeding, adventuring, and island decorating means there’s something for almost everyone. The art is stylized and professional, the sound effects are slick, and the interface is easy enough to learn. This is clearly a serious effort by a serious team, and well worth a look.