Look, I get it, I also enjoy being sad. Something about cresting in your 40s and feeling like you’ve made a series of wrong choices while also slowly seeing your physical and mental facilities deteriorate makes you go “Huh, I’m a little blue today.” So what do I do? Why, I load up my playlist of sadness, bawl my eyes out to the acoustic version of Sullivan by Caroline’s Spine, and maybe watch some Thai insurance commercials to really wreck me. But it’s sadness with a purpose. It allows me to face it, feel it, and then grow from it. Otherwise I’d just be lowkey enjoying nihilism, and I’m not an industrial music fan from the 90s (anymore). While I’m not trying to yuck anyone’s yum, it’s a special kind of sad sack who decides to tackle life, happy or otherwise, through the perspective of My Little Puppy.

Hey, ready to ruin EVERYONE’s day? You know it!

Hey, you know how dogs die? Of course they do! Go tell your children in case they were enjoying their time with the family pet too much. Anyways, you play a dog who definitely died and now is living in a peaceful, fun existence. You aren’t hungry, you don’t get tired, and you have friends. Things are great! But man, you miss your human. You don’t call him “my human,” though: you call him Daddy. Because you’re a dog, and he’s your daddy, and some folk are okay with thinking of animals as children, which I guess is better than when I was young and animals were expendable props. Anyways, you, the dog, are sad that Daddy isn’t here. Which means you want Daddy to hurry up and die so he can be with you. So one day, you get your wish! Daddy died! Happy days!

Yet…Daddy didn’t come over the rainbow road. Is he lost? Probably not, maybe he’s just in processing, but there’s no time to waste! You’ve only got eternity ahead of you, we can’t be patient! So the corgi that you play (because of course you’re a corgi) convinces another dog spirit to bite an angel guarding the gate and off you go. No worries for the fact that you coerced another animal to commit assault on a heavenly caretaker. Screw repercussions that could literally haunt you for the rest of existence as we know it, we need to be impatient and find out what happened! Did Daddy die of natural causes? Was he killed in a gunfight with police over loose cigarettes? Has there been a global extinction event but we only care about this bespectacled dude who kind of looks like the truly evil scientist from Full Metal Alchemist? Whatever!

My Little Puppy lets you then run around what can only be interpreted as other versions of Heaven, which kind of, sort of makes sense. After all, if you’re a Husky or some other kind of northern, active dog, you’ll be happiness around the snow and ice, the forests and the rivers. If you’re a beach dog because your “father” kept putting sunglasses on you and made you stand on a surf board while he was six Coronas deep into a Tuesday afternoon, maybe the beach is best. In any case, you, the corgi, need to use your keen sense of smell to guide you to where your Daddy is supposedly hanging out, without you, until the heat death of the universe or whatever. The point is he’s not with you, so why be patient? GO GET HIM!

But like, go ahead and stop to take a leak. It lights the way and also…it’s weird!

Now if My Little Puppy was just a game where a dog goes to find its master Daddy in Heaven, this would be sufficiently sad but also kind of short. Because the entire belief structure about Heaven and the pleasant Afterlife dictates that there should be no more suffering or want, only immeasurable happiness and joy at your perpetual spirit rejoicing and feeling bliss. So instead, Heaven is a place where you can be continually killed by the denizens that inhabit the different parts of the hereafter because shut up. As a dog spirit, you can fall into ravines, be murdered by polar bears, get sucked into sandpits and become a frozen corpse, doomed to sink to the bottom of an icy lake for all eternity. Because I guess that’s Heaven to someone else? The rules are very unclear, but the point is, Heaven is dangerous.

Which is why it’s so awesome that you’re a corgi! The most nimble, accurate and energetic dog to ever run…no? That’s not correct? A corgi is basically if the Blue Fairy granted the wish of a croissant that wanted to be an animal? Right, of course! For a game where there is tight platforming, fast twitch races and tons of QTE moments, you want to be a corgi. And there are tons as you move throughout the afterlife, helping animals that are hungry and lost and scared and in peril as a means to stretch out gameplay and make this entire plight of reunion have more substance. Never mind the implications that, when you’re in Heaven, you can apparently get lost and die of exposure, the important part is the dog is busy doing other things in lieu of getting to where he wants to be!

I’m about to get mauled by a hell bear, but first, let me take a selfie!

With My Little Puppy, the events should and could be interesting under other circumstances. If, for example, this was some kind of Homeward Bound situation where you’re traversing all across the globe to get home, the encounters with animals who needed your help, plus the various antagonistic entities you encounter, would make sense. After all, you’d definitely run into someone who lost their dog and was kind of turned around on a beach, and then wanted to help them. Totally tracks, no problem. But then you might not get to meet a trio of dogs who were euthanized and then got adopted by a chibi version of Death on their way to the next stage of existence! So we have to put the game in Heaven, right? Wait, is this Heaven?

Hold up, one second. So this is an afterlife where, after departing from the walled area where you are safest, you’re suddenly in a state where you can clearly feel pain and die, but you can’t experience release and need to be reincarnated to do it all again (standard video game stuff, but watch the scaffolding). Also, there are shapeless, red-eyed entities who patrol about for the express purpose of harming and pursuing humans and animals alike. Plus there are beasts (other dogs, bears) who apparently want to hurt you and, with one minor exception, have no proper role in this particular world other than to be an antagonist. While we all know what happened to the greatest antagonist of them all: Morningstar himself. Have I been misreading this game? Am I in doggy Hell?

That would actually make sense. After all, you’re constantly tormented and beset on all sides by distractions to prevent you from doing your most noble task of reuniting with your person. Much like Adam and Eve would have been happy but ignorant had they stayed in the Garden of Eden, your corgi would have continued to live a peaceful, blissful existence without needing to know pain, suffering or turmoil had it remained in the Rainbow Cloud area at the start of the game. Instead, My Little Puppy purposely has you cast yourself out, much like Lucifer himself chose to walk away from Heaven, in order to learn the truth and thus forever had God’s love turned away from him. Sweet lord, I think this is actually a biblical allegory and your dog is a fallen angel, destined to rule in Hell for daring to not be patient to God’s whim.

This, thankfully, is after the dog CPR rhythm game. No, I’m not joking.

All matters of even deeper existential crisis aside, the game just isn’t great in terms of gameplay. My Little Puppy is mostly you, walking around large but focused areas, trying to sniff out where to go and proceed forward. Yes, it’s kind of cute to watch the corgi’s little butt wiggle as it tries to climb a ledge. Yes, it’s adorable that you befriend a big dog who helps you get through the snow. No, it’s not fun to constantly need to do quick button pushes in order to not die. The platforming isn’t great, especially when the camera remains fixed. The act of simply trying to get across a bridge, for example, is fraught with peril and the constant, real concern of falling. You reload fast enough, to be sure, but the sound of a dog crying as it plummets never gets easier.

Oh, was that not clear for you dog lovers out there? As a game where you, the adorable dog, get constantly caught in both on and off screen deaths, you get to hear different versions of barks, yelps and whimpers of pain at all times. Is there music in the game? I imagine so, this wasn’t scored by John Cage, but goodness knows I stopped with any audio from this game once I realized what was at stake. The refrain of “you suck at this game AND you made an animal feel pain!” nearly took me out of the game entirely, but I decided to persevere with an alternative soundtrack instead. I felt that simply grooving to the Bones and All soundtrack gave the right energy to this, and maybe it didn’t but I was pretty jaded and nothing ever got better.

The hardest part is that My Little Puppy is basically horror porn of the highest degree, and that bums me out something fierce. We get it: people love their animals and it’s seriously so much better that humans treat pets better nowadays than we did back in the 80s, when my dog just lived outside and we filled a bowl up with freeze dried squares and assumed he was alright. We’ve learned, we’ve grown, awesome. And yea, some people still don’t treat animals wonderfully, and that’s unfortunate and honestly should be punished in a criminal manner more frequently. Which, if we want to condemn people who mistreat animals, maybe don’t casually have a dog with a massive chain around its neck in Heaven? No dog who isn’t being used for underground dog fights is happy that a fifteen pound chain is around its neck for all eternity!

And that one dog is in a wheeled harness? What, God couldn’t give him back his mobility?!?!

So every single instance of looking into anyone’s past is full of sadness, tears and pain. This dog? Totally just died and went on to the afterlife without anyone to care for them. The main character? Died on the vet’s table for reasons unknown and we just get to hear its Daddy weeping, loudly, as it passes. Oh, and guess what? There’s a vet in the game! A vet whose sole job, somehow, was euthanizing dogs! Like, that’s all she did! To the point where she couldn’t take it anymore! And the game doesn’t directly say she killed herself with dog poison but it sure as sugar coated rhubarb looks like she did! But now it’s fine because she’s in Heaven and she gets to take care of dogs and not just kill them all day! What in the Star Spangled Trauma Porn is this game, anyways??

Everything about My Little Puppy is wild in a horrific way. The game does not handle very well, and, when it does, it’s exceedingly boring. You walk around a lot, collect stuff, sometimes interact with stuff, and sniff to ensure you’re going the right way. The boundless reach of Heaven is restricted, and not always clear, leading to you running into walls. The shape of the corgi, combined with changes in terrain and stamina, lead to missed jumps, steps and bad timing issues. The only variable in the game is collecting green bottles that can extend your stamina, but none of it matters because you’ll arbitrarily get unlimited stamina for times where you really need it. Even fun moments, like when you get to bring a whole forest back to life with nourishing water, leads to the question: why was there desolation in Heaven to begin with?

This was actually quite entertaining, and it was the only thing in almost six hours of the whole game.

This is not a game for animal lovers. This isn’t even a game for casual animal acquaintances. This is for people who genuinely hate dogs, humans, life and the thought of Heaven being any kind of relief. It simultaneously justifies the suffering that we have on Earth by alluding to a better hereafter while also promising that the Afterlife is also painful, dangerous and full of grief. Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, and maybe everything that dies someday comes back, but not like this and not in this way. If my departed dog’s soul was in a realm like this, I would assume God just punished every living thing regardless. My Little Puppy is unredeemable, and you should go hug your pet, your child, your loved one, and not play this game.

My Little Puppy is available now on Steam and Nintendo Switch (2).

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2.

A copy of My Little Puppy was provided by the publisher.