Have you ever wanted to raise your own dogs? Do you ever wonder what would happen if you were to crossbreed a husky with an eight-legged green chihuahua? Do you believe in “you are what you eat” so much that you think eating nothing but french fries should turn you into a giand french fry? Do you just like adorably blursed, silly wobbly dog-like creatures? If so, you might enjoy this sandbox game about dog genetics that I’m sure is very accurate and realistic.
So my first introduction to this game was seeing RTgame play it on his channel, and I already thought this game was very cute and silly, but I didn’t end up getting the game for myself until much later, when I saw Fir was doing a sponsored stream to share the news that the game was releasing on the Switch. After learning about it, I decided to pick it up as a birthday treat, and what a sweet treat it was.
The gameplay loop of this game is pretty straightforward: hatch your dogs, feed them, keep them happy, watch them grow and mutate, colelct their eggs when they turn adult, use those to breed your dogs together and create new ones, repeat. It’s simple, but it works to give a cosy, laid-back experience. Your dogs don’t need much, and if they’re hungry or bored they can help themselves with the food dispensers or the toys laying around anyway, but it is satisfying to take care of your little critters and watch them grow and mutate. Speaking of their growth, your pups age up in 4 stages (juvenile, teen, young adult and adult), and when they’re ready to move to the next stage, the game gives you a prompt to let them “pupate”, after which the game brings up a screen to recap all of the mutations that your dog just went through.
Once you get two adult dogs though is where the fun really begins, as you get to breed your dogs together. Pick your two favourite, and you will enter the simulation chamber, where the simulation will throw out 3 to 5 new pups by essentially mixing, matching and blending the traits of the two parents you just selected. From there, you can either select one of them to be the child pup you want, or you can pick two of them to repeat the same process, which will give you another litter of a few pups. You can keep iterating the process to narrow down the possibilities more and more towards the idea dog you want, or you can just keep selecting the two wackiest creatures that come out and see where that leads. Be careful though, as the longer you go, the higher the chances are of a tiny litter where there’s only one pup, which is essentially the game forcing your hand into terminating the simulation loop and picking your final dog. But at the same time, going for multiple generations can also cause completely new traits to get generated out of nowhere, such as fur patterns, a fluffy tail, or even extra limbs. That’s how genetics work, right?
That said, while the gameplay is pretty fun and making new weird dogs can be exciting in its own right, what really hooked me onto this game is also the whole aesthetic of it. With the vibrant colours, lighthearted music, bubbly interface, and silly flavour text, the game really manages to create this cozy silly atmosphere that I simply adore. You also get rewarded for completing acievements with wallpapers, furniture, decorations or even extra rooms to personalise your dog house however you wish and make it feel like home. I ended up having a kitchen room, a street room, a jungle room and a play room. It felt very nice making it all look pretty, and it feels very nice playing with my cute wobbledogs in there. Everything is colourful, silly, and happy, and I love every bit of it.
All and all, this game has been a very good comfort game for me. It is worth noting that the Switch version does have a few performance issues, and the controls can be a bit awkward at times due to missing a mouse pointer, so the experience might be better on PC. I still have a lot of fun with this game regardless, and I really recommend it if you’re looking for a cute silly blursed game to make you smile or pass the time.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1424330 £15.99
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/wobbledogs £15.99
Switch: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Wobbledogs-2293660.html £15.99
Leave a Reply