For anybody aiming to relive the Nintendogs trend of the mid-2000s, Little Friends: Puppy Island is your video game. It’s a relaxing family pet simulator video game with an easy primary gameplay loop and a handful of minigames sprayed in. There’s not a great deal of meat to the video game, however you’re here to have fun with charming puppies initially and not truly anything 2nd, which is precisely what you get. You get to have a good time with puppies of all various types, which’s all you require.
The property of Little Friends: Puppy Island is precisely what it seems like: you’re on an island filled with friendly, wild puppies. You and your puppy exist to house-sit for a friend, and you get to check out the island and befriend as lots of puppies as you can discover while you’re there. With the puppies’ help, you can discover brand-new locations and establish the island. It’s all for the pups’ advantage, obviously. It’s extremely barebones and doesn’t make a great deal of sense, however that’s not in fact crucial. The video game has a story of some kind and it’s cohesive enough, which is more than the majority of anybody has actually ever desired in a family pet sim.
What comprises the bulk of the video game is you selecting among your puppy pals and walking them around the island path. When you’re on the path, you can discover brand-new puppies and make pals with them, build things like a shop and a dog park, and gradually, discover brand-new parts of the island to check out. After a while, your puppy will get filthy or starving or simply require some love and you’ll need to go back to your friend’s house to look after them. That’s rather temporary, however, as cleansing and feeding and whatever you require to remain on the path takes an extremely brief time. It got relatively repeated relatively rapidly, which wasn’t excellent thinking about how it’s the large bulk of the video game, however there were a couple of things to help separate the dullness.
One of the very best parts of Little Friends: Puppy Island is the barriers on the path that you cross by finishing little minigames. They position little difficulty and take all of about 10 seconds to finish, however they keep you engaged and are plenty charming given that they’re dog-themed. The kind of minigame even alters depending upon the kind of barrier, which is a great method to keep things fresh.
Screenshot by means of Siliconera
There are a couple of other minigame-type things to do on the path. Befriending puppies includes discovering them and after that approaching them gradually, bewaring not to scare them by moving too rapidly. Every so frequently, there are wild animals like squirrels that you stop your puppy from barking at by pushing the ideal button at the correct time. Even advancement jobs are bring missions (heh), with you discovering products and bringing them to the build website. None of it is tough by any methods, however it provides you something to do.
When you do wind up needing to go back to your friend’s house, you get to another among the most pleasurable parts of Little Friends: Puppy Island: getting to dress up your puppies. Dressing them up is a few of the most enjoyable to be had with the video game given that there are many various pieces of clothes to select from. It’s extremely simple to spend a great deal of time going through all your choices and offering each of your dogs the best clothing. Personally, putting shutter tones on among my little friends was among the very best choices I’ve made ever. And given that there are likewise lots of dog types on the island, there are more choices for which dog to dress up and how than you can shake a stick at.
Screenshot by means of Siliconera
You can likewise shower, feed, and have fun with your pups, which is relatively cool since doing so in fact impacts the video game. As your pups walk the path, they’ll get filthy and starving, as revealed by their assesses. Bathing and feeding them fix those issues and let you solve back onto the path. They’re not incredible activities that you wish to need to do continuously, and I discovered that bathing needing you to in fact scrub the dogs was a little unneeded when cuddling them is done the precise very same method, however them being incorporated into the total system is great.
Screenshot by means of Siliconera
Meanwhile, playing assists build a few of your puppies’ statistics. You’ll require greater statistics to handle more path barriers, offering the video game a sensation of development. Most statistics increase passively as you walk too, so there’s no grinding to be done, and the ones that don’t can be leveled up by playing a few of the minigames like stopping your puppy from barking. Heck, even cuddling them develops statistics, since what is a family pet sim if you can’t family pet your little friends?
As an entire, Little Friends: Puppy Island is comfortable and pleasurable, however it’s not truly a video game that seemed like it might be bet a prolonged amount of time. It is quite a comfortable, relax-and-unwind sort of video game, or a video game suggested for younger kids who wish to do all the important things with all the puppies. I didn’t especially do not like any part of it, however it didn’t take long to seem like it was getting repeated. Playing for anything more than about 45 minutes to an hour almost made me believe I was getting familiarity. But, well, it’s absolutely a comfortable video game that anybody trying to find some downtime can enjoy simply put spurts.
Little Friends: Puppy Island is available now on Nintendo Switch and PC by means of Steam.
