With trends and trendy games passing by these days, I’d understand if you’d already forgotten about Suika Game. I am not here to remind you of its existence to talk about it, more so use it as genre context for Dogpile, a new game that is essentially the question “what if Suika Game actually had a bunch of dogs and was also a roguelike deckbuilder?” I know, I know, there are too many of those already, but this one’s just so charming!
First of all, the entire thing is hand-drawn and animated. I feel like the best way I can describe the vibes of the aesthetic is that it looks like one of those fancy greetings cards in a boutique shop that costs more money than you’re comfortable with, but it’s for your aunt who you quite like and want to get a good chuckle out of her.
Instead of matching different types of fruit, here you must fuse various breeds of dogs together to create larger, equally funny looking dogs. They don’t just come in circles either, there’s all sorts of shapes adding one layer of tactical gameplay. You choose particular dogs to play from the cards you draw from your deck, but to mix things up all of these canines can have different positive and negative modifiers.
For example, there’s a friendly modifier that essentially magnetises two matching dogs towards one another. On the other end, there’s a crated modifier that means those dogs can’t merge at all for a couple of rounds. Dogtags allow you to add in even more ways to mix up rounds, like one that turns every dog that’s smaller than a pug into a pug.
To be honest I find Suika Game quite displeasing to look at, and ultimately there’s only so much it can do. Dogpile, despite being yet another roguelike deckbuilder, looks like it might satisfy that itch I have for something more. And it’s out right now! Today! At 30% off on Steam! What more can you ask for?