![]() ![]() No doubt it’s already achieved comic sublimity on YouTube. Yes, it is what it is (and it is what the name of its developer promises: a Surreal Distraction), but in order for it to work as an enjoyable aesthetic experience, it requires a whole overlay of mental effort and interpretation on the part of the player. The game is one of those non or anti-games like Goat Simulator or I am Bread, which means it carries with it a sense of incompleteness. Even before that, you’re probably going to get hit by a car. The game has five meters (food, water, fitness, happiness, poop) that tick down and down with every passing second you can refill them individually, but it’s only a matter of time before the entropy of dog life gets out of hand. And that’s assuming you haven’t died yet. At the northwest corner of the map you’ll find the Lost Woods, but what do you get if you reach the end? Not the Master Sword but one of the squirrels that hangs out around it-a squirrel that goes to live in your house. Nailing something small, like a butterfly, with that almighty stream is one of the few things in this game that feels rewarding another is using your explosive poop to blow up walls or cars.Īlthough it gets its pixelated, deliberately grungy aesthetic from Atari 2600 simulations, Domestic Dog plays more like a rudimentary Zelda in which there is no quest, no princess, and no discernible point. Above all else, pee physics appear to have been the designers’ primary focus. Or you can pee, which transforms everything and provides immediate satisfaction: animals turn yellow, manhole covers flip over, transistors fizzle, the world comes alive. You can use the contextual action button, which will do things like dig a hole or trample grass. ![]() You can bark, which has zero effect on the environment around you birds will not fly away, other dogs will not come running. In Domestic Dog Simulator, you can do precisely three things at any given moment in your life as a randomly-generated dog. They have little in common aside from the way they ostentatiously foreground your average dog’s heroic capacity to produce what Ackerley calls “liquids and solids”-but good Lord do they get mileage out of that. My Dog Tulip is a weird book Domestic Dog Simulator is a weird game. ![]()
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