To the Rescue!

released on Nov 02, 2021

To The Rescue! is a charming dog shelter simulator. Take care of unique dogs and find the right homes for as many of them as you can. Upgrade your shelter, control disease outbreaks, learn each dog's preferences, and make tough decisions, all while helping support real-world animal shelters! Each day brings new challenges and rewards. Dogs have specific preferences, can get infectious diseases, and can have negative traits. But you can also have fundraisers, get random donations, and help someone find their new best friend. Unfortunately, there's never enough room, and always more dogs.


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This was such a disappointment for me. I've wanted an animal shelter video game since I was a little kid, and I was so excited to play this! I loved the pre-alpha demo so much that I played it for hours. Unfortunately, as is the case with a lot of Kickstarter games, this is horribly buggy. I was hoping the bugs would get patched out, but it seems that when the devs fixed bugs, new ones would take their place. They don't seem to be working on the game anymore, which is a shame.

Here is a list of bugs I encountered:
-I could no longer place the water bucket back on its hook and it was stuck in my inventory.
-I became stuck in dog leashing mode and had to restart the game.
-Dogs clip through walls.
-Dogs poop in walls.
-Dogs get into fights with dogs in other kennels.
-The game becomes horribly laggy when you put dogs into kennels that do not have food or water since they try over and over again to eat and drink from the empty dishes.
-Random lag and choppiness.
-The game let me build a play area with a fence that clipped into the dog bathing area. I had to demolish it, wasting a ton of money.
-Dogs stop eating and drinking for no reason and instead walk back and forth endlessly in their pens.
-The game crashes when a dog gets adopted from a foster home.

I'm very sad about the state of this game. I did manage to have some fun with it and the dogs are adorable, but the constant bugs and crashing just wore me down. Plus, the pacing is off and there are long periods of absolutely nothing to do. The pre-alpha demo was less buggy and had better pacing!

This is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of the worst games I have ever played. The other half of the star is for the mere concept of it being fun, in execution there is not even a hope of enjoyment to be had with this game. The good reviews for this game are downright sickening. The people who made this are also sickening. This is foolishness, this is buffonery, this is downright robbery and trickery.

Where can I even start with it? It would be easier to talk about the parts of the game that actually work. The basis of the game: you run a rescue center. Theres dogs in it. People adopt the dogs. Not one part of this process functions as it should. Horrible control scheme. Jaw-droppingly stupid. Things that should just be A or X are abominable combinations that I cant even remember half the time. Imagine: decorating. Pick the thing you want then press A to purchase. WRONG. Select your purchase with the left stick, move cursor to place it, put it down with ZL. You didnt actually buy it. Press + to confirm that youre actually buying the thing you already put down. Wait 7 minutes because the ingame PC you're making this transaction on is insultingly slow. In fact, all the menus lag. The game lags. But the menus specifically make me feel like im wading through mud. Oh... tutorial? Did you read it? Sorry, because they are never showing it to you again. The tutorial is shockingly long while also not telling you what to do. And after it is done they leave you clueless. I was stuck for 3 hours trying to figure out how to access a menu.

Pacing issues. Overwhelming pacing issues. Dogs shitting themselves and tearing each other faces off and I cant give them the time of day because 8 new strays just came in for some fucking reason and each dog needs their special food and drink and accommodations. Someone walks into a dog shelter, unsure if they actually want a dog. They ask me to bring out and hand pick 5 dogs for them instead of the customer just walking around the shelter like an actual person. If they dont like all 5 dogs they will decide they were just cruising and leave. Im sure that exciting gameplay loop makes you wet and ready for more action so im so happy to say that that's all there is. If you have a dog with a disability just forget about them because, despite the fact that this is a shelter, customers have exceedingly high standards in direct contrast to the game's ride or die attitude on adopt, dont shop.

Does not function. Nothing about this game functions. Dogs shit in the walls and I cant see it. Dogs get stuck in the walls and get diseases and starve and dehydrate. Dogs have fights through the walls. The game believes certain dogs do not exist and I can no longer interact with them. Dogs get stuck in the play pen and the game will not let the dogs leave, ever. The game crashes and softlocks when you do complicated things such as opening a menu on the PC or taking a dog for a walk. The unstuck button itself fails to work. Unbearable. Inoperable.

Someone once said that we have it all wrong, that we should cry when one enters this world and rejoice when they leave it. Thats how I feel about these fucking dogs. Euthanized and they dont have to bear the weight of being trapped in this horrible game. The person who made this, never dare to even think about making another game again. Any good you put in this world will be a shadow of the torment you put me through. I hate you.


I want my 10 dollars back.

It’s cute but the game play loop simply isn’t very compelling.

The idea is great.
Gameplay is entertaining, but the bugs and other issues make the game hard to play.
I've spend hours trying to figure out why no more dogs spawn, turns out that it's a known issue that just doesn't get fixed.

Even though there are settings to make time go by slower, I would still find myself overwhelmed and working overtime, trying to get all the dogs taken care of. I Probably had a bad strategy when playing the game, but I found the time management to be too overwhelming for my own personal enjoyment.
Other then that and the stress of overtime it was fun, had great mechanics and most importantly, cute dogs.

It's a strange, under-designed, buggy mess... so why can't I stop playing?!