Untitled Goose Game and Goat Simulator were pioneers in the creation of a subgenre of casual game I can only describe as “animal mayhem”. In those games, you play as a seemingly normal animal, and your goal is to simply wreak havoc and annoy the living hell out of humans and other animals nearby. Whilst these games have become bonafide viral hits, I never found them to be anything other than merely fine. Maybe it’s the fact I don’t care about geese or goats. I am a dog person, however, so maybe the brand new Doogy Don’t Care might truly win me over instead.

If this game doesn’t make you a cat person, then you’re just like me.

In Doggy Don’t Care, you play as an unfazed and utterly bored pug. Your goal is simple: you are locked inside a specific level full of objectives. In order to proceed to the next mini sandbox, you gotta complete them all, and they are all laid out in a somewhat cryptic, but easy to understand manner. These objectives are all about wreaking havoc inside your owner’s house, inside a farm, and so on. Think of Doggy Don’t Care as a simplified collectathon where the main macguffin is acquired by completing a handful of puzzles, usually in the shape of something that would make any kind of sane human lose their goddamn mind.

You might need to pee on a rumba, break a TV, feed human breakfast to a bunch of starving pigeons, destroy five garden gnomes, ruin the house’s carpet by covering yourself in motor oil and then walking around like nobody’s business, and so on. Mind you, this is just a fraction of the objectives you have to complete in the first level alone, with each new level increasing in size, scope, and level of idiocy. In the second level, for instance, you will need to look for a way to turn on a combine harvester, and then throw all of the farm’s tools inside its shredder. Why? Because doggy don’t care. Duh.

The goose didn’t like me. I made him pay the ultimate price.

It’s as straightforward as it gets. The controls are stupidly simple: there’s a bark button (it does nothing), a jump button, an interaction button (usually in the shape of picking something with your mouth), and most importantly, a pee button. Because you’re apparently a pug with the ultimately mastery in bladder control, and you’re able to pee as much as you want, whenever, wherever. None of the puzzles require that many brain cells for you to solve, though you can always count on a helpful NPC to give you a hint on a missing objective, just in case. The only true gripe I have with the controls is the awkward camera system, which is super slow, even when you set the sensitivity meter to the maximum.

This is not the kind of game that wows you with its presentation. It is heavily inspired by Untitled Goose Game‘s color pallette and minimalism, running well enough and even looking, very occasionally, quite cute. I adored how unfazed the pug looks. Then again, I will be the first one to admit that the visuals tend to get a bit tiresome after a while. The music, on the other hand, is a bit better. The amount of songs included in the package is small, but they are, for the most part, quite mischievous and oddly catchy.

This wasn’t even an objective. I demolished my owner’s sofa just for the sake of it. And then peed on it. Naturally.

Doggy Don’t Care isn’t the most memorable game in recent memory, nor will it attempt to win any awards. It’s a very simple, dumb-as-a-pug mischief simulator that won’t require too much of your attention (or brain cells), but it is quite entertaining in small bursts, as in, say, one level a time. Whilst short and overly simplistic, it manages to perfectly balance the fact it doesn’t take itself seriously with it not feeling like a pointless joke, either. Shut your brain off for a few minutes while you’re playing it, and you’ll have a moderately good time.

Doggy Don’t Care is available now on PC.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB.

A copy of Doggy Don’t Care was provided by the publisher.