okay actually what the fuck? what the dog doin

This games fuckin weird bro. Pretty much every individual part of this game goes for a completely different tone, and it all comes together as the gaming equivalent of eating paste made out of bananas, peas, and sardines. The visuals are made up of reasonably solid looking (albiet framerate-chugging) levels populated by uncanny-looking people. The writing is immensely crass and immature, with a wise-cracking snarky dog interacting with a myriad of cheesy stereotypes with enough poop/fart/sex jokes added in to make any middling dreamworks movie blush. The soundtrack ranges from bumping techno jingles to ambient music that straight up astral projects me to another plane of existence. Our doggy protagonist moves and animates with a shockingly realistic attention to detail compared to other cartoony platformers. It really does feel like the games director, writers, animators, composers, and designers all misunderstood the assignment in their own unique way, making the game an absolute tonal rollercoaster. And that's not even considering the unfittingly eerie and morbid ending.

The thing is though, the actual core game is a pretty solid collectathon, and the more I played it and got used to the serial-killer vibes the game has, the more I honestly enjoyed it. It really did feel like there was a lot of genuine thought in analyzing what dogs do and how to convert them into palpable game mechanics. Like dogs usually just beg, retrieve stuff for people, piss and shit everywhere, dig around in the mud, bark at things, sniff around random places, and eat potentially questionable food from god knows where. All of those aspects of being a dog and more are covered in this game, and the main gameplay of doing dog things to accomplish tasks to earn bones to progress is just as fun as collecting progress mcguffins in any other collectathon.

The game is weird, but it's not half-assed shovelware. If anything, the bizarre vibes make this game certainly hard to ever forget, and I could definitely see this game leaving an impact on me in many different ways if I had played it growing up. It definitely has a cult following, and I can honestly see why. Give it a shot if you enjoy some absolute strange fuckshit. Sasuga europe

I'll admit, I was attracted to this game after seeing an article about it in a gaming mag shortly before its release where there were pictures showing that you could piss and shit on command. One particular picture, of Jake on the hood of a police car leaving a brown steamer as a gift, sold me and the rest was history. Thankfully, the game was more than this one trick pony action. I found myself charmed by the characters and the simple story and the basic gameplay. It sits as the entry point on my top 30 favorite games list and I wouldn't have it any other way.