It should go without saying that there be SPOILERS for the game here. They will NOT be censored. It is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED you play the game at least once. Please :3?

The TLDR is that NO, KinitoPET does NOT destroy your computer, hack it, encrypt your files, delete all your info, etcetc. It's also not a virus, not even close. The magic of some of the jumpscares function similarly to how DDLC does it in its finale, or how Shimeji pets operate.

In this guide, I try to explain what the jumpscares do, but not how they function. I don't know how to decompile games and someone else could probably do that way better than I could even if I did know. I just wanna clarify how some of it works in pretty simple terms!

I won't go every jumpscare. Just the ones that may seem to pose a security risk to you or your computer. This will cover the regular mode of the game, not the streamer mode.

When you start the game, you'll see a on/off button on the desktop screen. This is the beginning to the overlay of the game, and a key explanation to how the game functions! Because....
The game itself is overlaying your desktop! Your stuff on the desktop "disappears" for a moment to make way for the game's desktop overlay so it looks more realistic, otherwise whatever you had on your desktop would be layered over and just look weird. If you close the game at any point, your desktop should rollback to what it looked like before the game started.



If you happen to have any programs open before starting KinitoPET and for whatever reason they aren't minimised when the game initialises, they'll sometimes stay open under the game overlay, and cannot be closed or interacted with unless you minimise KinitoPET. This can happen when the CRT option is disabled but your custom background is enabled.

TRIVIA: Sometimes when you open the game, and you press the button, it won't load immediately. Instead, there's increasingly loud static, and after about 20 seconds, the game loads. This doesn't happen all the time, I suspect it to be RNG based (however it has happened everytime I've opened the game while making this guide so maybe a recent update has changed this? Before this guide it happened only occasionally. Let me know if you've also experienced this :0)

While the game is running, you can change the settings in the game to either reflect your current background or the default "Bliss" we see from Windows XP.
What matters to this guide is the custom background option being enabled.


After this scare, several different copies of my background were created, but were reverted back as soon as the game was closed.

Occasionally the background may fail to revert back. I found this happened only once during my several playthroughs and was pretty easy to fix.

During the Best Friends Analysis hub, Kinito will ask to see your face. Regardless of your answer, he will open the camera app. This scare won't execute properly if you've never granted camera perms to the default app, the webcam is covered or unplugged, or have it disabled from the BIOS menu or any other software/organization that may restrict access.

During the KinitoPET Membership signup, when you enter your mailing address, Kinito will suspect you made a mistake and use the Windows search menu to look up your location. This scare will fail to execute properly if you have the functionality disabled. I personally use OOSU, so my camera and location were blocked by default, as well as the Bing integration into the Start menu. But for the typical user, they'll never have touched these settings, and so Kinito prompting Bing to search your location is something that most search engines will probably have access to, if you haven't taken countermeasures to restricting those permissions.

Touching on this signup, there's already an in-game tooltip that will inform you that if you enter a valid email address you'll be sent a one-time email thanking you for joining the Membership Club. You can also unsubscribe from the email by clicking the link at the bottom.

After the membership signup, KinitoPET will ask you to grant administrative privileges. It DOES open the genuine command prompt, but the command it asks you to input is not the actual command used to grant apps admin access. Putting in valid commands makes him insist you have the commands wrong, but they will still execute.
It should go without saying that you should never grant an app admin privileges if you don't know exactly what you're doing!

In Arc 2 of the game there's several scares that I'll bunch together here.

KinitoPET will open MS Paint and take control of the cursor to ask you a question. You can move the mouse around but it will continue to attempt to write out the question, and include the name you chose for yourself at the beginning of the game.

I've seen that when he asks if you're afraid of the dark, your monitor will shut off. I play my games exclusively on laptop so I'm not affected, but if your setup is sensitive to sudden outages, just be aware of this scare.

KinitoPET will ask you who's your best friend during the "Getting to know you" segment. If you fail to answer "Kinito" as the input, he will turn the computers volume up to max and asks you again.

Kinito will ask about your real name during Arc 3. If you have your genuine name set in your User Profile within Windows, he pulls your name from that. In my case it's not my real name, so the scare didn't really land for me.

I hope this guide helped to make it easier playing the game. If I missed something you think should be in here, put a comment down!