This game is actually really good... who would have thought a game commissioned by a brand about dogs where you play as dogs in their style would have you fighting ancient T-Rex', going on dates (this was really weird), and exploring booby trapped ancient tombs ala Indiana Jones.

This game is somehow filled with intense emotion and somewhat serious topics for a game that you'd look at and think was made for very young children. Everything is done in a way that gives it enough nuance to feel genuinely emotional but not so much that it would come across as maybe too serious? Whimsy is a word I would use to describe this game. Emotional and whimsical. A game about tiny dogs with big fuckin heads.

I feel like the game hit the wayside with it's characters. They do take the time to actually give some of these funny dogs characters and personalities but there are a lot of characters in this game that just kinda sit around and do nothing. I guess this game is pretty much an RPG so it's not that weird but the fact that they're all just dogs that, well, look like normal dogs, they don't really stand out against each other. Except for the slightly racist Chinese stereotype dogs, you'll never forget them. The music in this game is also very good. Very peaceful acoustics that will probably stick to my mind as one of the better soundtracks I've heard in a game. This composer has never done anything else besides this and some weird Disney thing who cares somebody hire this woman please.

This game is... fun. It's very simple, it's very relaxing, and it goes places you wouldn't expect for a game about tiny dogs with big heads. It even does a lot visually that's very cool! This game is very pleasing to the eye, I mean it's a wii game it doesn't have a whole lot going on but it has pretty colors oooh

Everything about this game is just lovely except the part where they force you to date a dog for no reason and it has no bearings on anything that happens in the game ever and the dog you are forced to date never even acknowledges that it happened??? It's really weird and it made me uncomfortable sorry...

Play this game if you're super smart and are a good person! please buy me the bulldog plush

EDIT: Just saw the Japanese box art if someone has a list of boxarts that got fucked up overseas add this one please

Never thought I'd be sitting on backloggd, writing about a random shovelware game on Steam that I payed 50 cents for but I mean hey, there's a first for everything.

When I was talked into playing this game, and actually looked at screenshots for it I expected shitty semi open unity (god speed) asset cat collectathon or something of that ilk, NOT the worst auto runner in the world. Cool hats though. Unlike normal Steam games that are pumped out and sold for 50 cents every week this one is ACTUALLY a scam. The second to last level is FILLED with mostly illegible text in the backdrop asking you not to pirate games, and to help him do something. I'd go back and try to read it as well as my body could let me, but damn I already uninstalled it. And the final level? Physically impossible to beat, according to the developer, a "game breaking, unfixable bug". What is the game breaking unfixable bug you ask? A gap between 2 platforms that is too big to jump. I mean hey props to this guy(? I literally don't know since no one has ever seen the credits assuming there even are any) I can't blame the hustle, probably made like 10 bucks off of some poor kids. Probably not kids though, considering the google server room PC that you'll need to properly run any of these greenlit indie games on Steam. I'd give this game half a star but I mean hey it's butt ugly martians fidelity cats in it that's pretty cool, instead I will give it nothing because it sucked my soul out of my face for 3 hours I think I genuinely said nothing with another person here with me for the entire 3 hours I was lost in this maze. If someone knows how to hack games hmu I'll pay you in Pokémon cards

So why exactly did I bother to sit down and think about this game any further considering what it is? Idk here's a picture of my cat I think he's pretty cool. Hats off to all my brave soldiers that willingly sacrificed their 50 cents for this game or otherwise. Unless it was porn, I don't perceive you.

Energy Drink Companion

While the low fi beats to sleep to aesthetic of this represents as a decent introductory reference point for building confidence that rhythm games aren't that hard. It would be a tenuous one, since as Patricia covers it doesn't introduce the concept of sycopation at all, its just a 'clap along' game with several different inputs.

It's interesting to see that people are bringing up comparisons to rhythm heaven because in actual fact I think this game only 'works' if you dont know that game exists and dont get access to it. I might not ever beat rhythm heaven but even what I've played of it I know its way more engaging than this is. For instance in the first 3 levels of Rhythm Heaven you have tap, drag, hold input varience introduction. In Melatonin you dont have that level of varience introduced until 10 levels in. Melatonin wants to be easy in order to guide the player through its highly cultivated visual experience rather than test the player. Sure I got stumped in a few situations but only because it relies so heavily on visual clap along that are often unclear. It became at most a matter of resetting once or twice. Meanwhile in rhythm heaven you might get stuck on a level for a while and might even have to redo the ealier ones again.

So if it relies so heavily on its visual stimulus what is there to say about it? Well the funny thing about trying to write around visual art is that any reader could easily just look at it and decide for themselves which is why I tend not to focus on that too much in most of my write ups. Here though its worth stressing that when you actually are enveloped in this pastel wonderland and having to input in response to it, its appalling. There are a few cases where they remove the visual stimulus like for example in the Mind level where the character gets sleepy and you only see a fraction of the screen. It becomes more bearable to play in this condition. It's often better to input based on sound queues to instead of simple visual responses for a few of the levels as well

The symbolism itself is also both trite and exceptionally late capitalist in its blunt depiction of a dreamscape as economically fueled. There's no surrealism in this, this isn't utilizing the bizzare of dream logic or its distress in the way Un Chien Andalou or firths Sock series would, we aren't working with the dream brush of a Dali here. We aren't even working with a disneyesque one ala Alice and Wonderland (1951). It's a collagan mash of Late Burton and the weakest late 10's cartoon network animation (Bee and Puppycat and We Bare Bears).

If you can believe it theres also some frusterating UI choices to. If you beat the combination levels at the end of each night and press the button you are throw immediately into the 'hard mode' version, but you can bypass it by just going to the map. If you aren't playing the hard mode versions of the levels before, why would you want to now. If you want to go back to try levels from previous nights you would have to rifle through a bunch of menus to get there to even look at a section of them, rather than just have it be a simple overworld. Trying to make the overworld 'immersive' at the expense of actually being able to just discern which levels you've done is one element I complained about in my Pizza Tower diagnostic. I was being nice about it there but now I'm just enourmously frusterated in retrospect, if you are proud of your level design why stuff it away in a cupboard like that? A non-discerning eye might try to blame it on something like Mario Galaxy for introducing the idea of an immersive hubworld. I would actually say this is more the consequences of even earlier Mario games (World, 3, etc.) and its 'nostalgic' reintroduction recently with the 3D World titles. If I felt any softness for either of these two games, that it had a rare moment where I was enjoying it. Its been sullied by treating their own gamespace in such a segmented fashion. Even with the game as short as it is, there should be as little interrupting me from entering levels as possible. It's a design approach that puts the idea of difficulty scaling over any desire for mastery. What it ends up incentivizing is not a gratification of completing certain sections but instead, fully restarting from the beggining and going as perfect as you can through each.

What we have is a game too afraid to commit either to strange visual abudance or difficulty scaling. Trapped in a limbo of their own curation, your protagonist limbers in a wasteland of millenial tropes. Letting tindr and monster energy imprint into thier headspace while they continue the stereotypes of Avacado Toast consumption. While the stereotype never arises to a level of offensiveness that a racial one does, its nonetheless irritating and vacuous. If its a parody of that landscape, its too cheeky to stand for anything.

If anybody accuses you of not engaging with art outside your comfort zone, I give you permission to roll your eyes and throw something like this at them, ask if this is what they want you to try out instead. If it is, dont let them pester you. No need to have such a somambulant relationship with the world.