Doggy Don’t Care review for PC

Doggy Don’t Care is the latest entry in the “animals behaving badly” genre that kind of began with Goat Simulator, but that really hit its stride with Untitled Goose Game – which, somehow, came out seven years ago, and that’s had enough imitators and copycats in the years since that Goose-likes could almost be described as its own microgenre.

While the imitators have been of varying quality, and some (like Little Kitty, Big City) have been charming in their own right, none have ever quite matched Untitled Goose Game as a complete package. Unsurprisingly, Doggy Don’t Care doesn’t either. But it’s still fun enough that if you want to play as an animal causing mayhem, it scratches that same itch.

The gist of the game is that you’re playing as a dog whose owner has foolishly left it behind while she goes out to run chores. While it starts simply enough, with you destroying your home’s couch cushions, unravelling toilet paper, and smashing glassware, it soon escalates to you wreaking havoc at a farm, an office, and a museum.

What stops Doggy Don’t Care from really attaining the highs of Untitled Goose Game is that it’s a little too straightforward for its own good. Each level has all kinds of achievements you need to attain in order to move on, but for the most part you’ll be able to get them just by destroying everything that you can touch. There’s the odd moment where you need to take a second to figure out what else you can do – replacing the heads on statues with dinosaur skulls, for example, takes a bit of lateral thinking the game doesn’t otherwise demand of you, but for the most part, you’ll be able to fly through all the achievements without giving it much thought.

Mind you, that’s also the good thing about Doggy Don’t Care. It’s not a deep game, but it’s not trying to be – after all, it’s a game where you can get multiple achievements just by peeing on things. It’s the sort of game you can play for a couple of hours, do everything it has to offer, and not think about too much – and have a lot of fun while doing it. It’s hardly high art, but there’s something fun about smashing apart dinosaur skeletons, shaking soda cans until they explode, and bouncing as high as you can off of sheep.

My only real qualm is with the weird save system. The game keeps track of your badges, but if you quit mid-level, it resets everything so that you’ll have the badge, but the world reverts to being fully intact. I suspect that the reason for this has something to do with the sheer amount of destruction you can cause and making that persist after you’ve quit a game – plus, the levels are short enough that you should be able to finish each one (if not all of them) in one sitting – but it’s still a little annoying.

If that’s the biggest issue with Doggy Don’t Care, though, that’s really not too bad, and it speaks to how enjoyable the game is. As I said, it’s not quite on the level of Untitled Goose Game, but it’s solid enough that anyone who liked that one should like this too.

Rotub Games provided us with a Doggy Don’t Care PC code for review purposes.