Sun Dogs

当我玩了这游戏后，心情就跟这游戏的中文直译是一样的 真是日了一群狗了.. 鉴于本来就是冲着名字买的，给个好评

https://youtu.be/t0mFVtUduGA Sun Dogs is a text adventure scifi game with some neat visuals to represent the solar system you are going about in. The story unfolds through you exploring moons and planets in our solar system and all of this plays to the backdrop of some great music. I enjoyed this with a reservation, there is a tutorial but it is so limited that during my time playing I recieved some items and skills and had no idea how to use them to affectr the outcome of anything. A lot of the game is like that you need to figure it out yourself. Once you get in that mindset then it's fine, but I do wonder at them having a tutorial that teaches you very little. The first mission might have been an excellent way of hand holdig you through what to do. Maybe this isn't the point but I do feel like I wasted a lot of time figuring stuff out rather than enjoying it. There were a couple of minor bugs where it couldn't find the story files but that was never game breaking and was only a minor inconvenience. All in all my 25 minutes starting out was not enough. I really needed more time to get to know this game. I fear that a lot of people who might enjoy it could give up in that time. I know I'm not going to and will persevere, there is a great game in there and I just need to work it out. As an added bonus you can add in your own story files if you wanted to which would give you a truely unique gaming experience.

Okay, this game is pretty amazing. If the description of it sounds interesting to you at all, do yourself a favor and give it a try. I HIGHLY recommend it.

Mentioning a theme is not exploring a theme, and disjoint passages you have no control over isn't a game. This is like a series of tweet-length passages about a world, printed out and strewn on the floor, then when you've read a certain amount of them, they all catch on fire and a new copy of the same notes is thrown on the ground. I don't wish to be unduly cruel, but if an experience isn't fun, it's not fun. If you're okay reading through an experience that randomly resets, not "death isn't the end" but just flat-out resets, then it might be for you, but I wouldn't recommend it.

This is an interesting and entertaining short game, though not one without some quirks. If you liked the novel, The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi I think you will enjoy this game. Like that novel, the game is set in a distant future where advancing technologies have made humanity into something vastly different. In Sundogs the player's mind is downloaded into designer bodies (called cortical stacks and sleeves, game terms I presume were borrowed from the novel Altered Carbon). These stacks can be uploaded for literal save points. Die, and you are given a new sleeve with all the memories and skills retained from your last upload. And like these novels, Sundogs invokes it post-human vistas with words. This is a text adventure across a post-human solar system, where the player has a choice of destinations, whether they be roving mines on the surface of Mercury, asteroid colonies so old no one remembers who first colonized them, partially flooded arcologies or vibrant orbital constructs. I found the locations to be quite striking, though this is all conveyed through text. The actual graphics elements in the game are extremely minimialistic. I don't consider this a drawback, although its clearly not for everyone. To me, the game is like reading a short story set in a distant, post-human solar system. I quite enjoyed it. I do wish they had gone a bit farther, though, and expanded the gameplay elements. In the course of a playthrough one can gather items and skills. If you are killed you lose the latter, but retain the knowledge. These different skills and items do seem to effect what happens at different locations, but their utility is opaque. A second issue I had is that while certain actions are risky, the risk is not something that the player can control. Bad things just happen, a space pod is lasered by pirates, or a train explodes, and then you are back where you did your previous upload. When on a mission - and there are a few - the only way to mitigate potential troubles is to simply fly to a location and not explore it, yet that exploration is where the game excels. Finally, I am not sure if there is an endgame. Perhaps I simply didn't reach it in my two play throughs. I was sort of expecting other locations to open up, and yet... there seems to be no final destination. On a positive side, the game can be modified. I have not tried this myself, but the text and branches can (as far as I can tell) be easily altered. I am unsure if one can add new locations. I do like this game, and I do recommoned it to anyone who enjoys reading hard science fiction. I do wish they had allowed for greater player agency.

[h1]Summary[/h1] Sun Dogs is an “art project” of sorts disguised as a video game. It is set in a post-mortal transhuman civilization; that which used to be mankind is now consciousness, backed up by a “cortical stack”, that inhabits a “sleeve”. Sleeves can come in many varieties and shapes, including a non-humanoid arachnid-esque frame for those that feel particularly spider-ey. Anyway, civilization spans all across the solar system (not including or beyond Jupiter. So I believe five of the microplanets if you include Vesta, in addition to the known planets and moons.) You are an inhabitant of a “sleeve”, with a space ship. The planets, locations, and yourself are represented as circles orbiting the central axis in what is a two-dimensional representation of our solar system. The extent of the “gameplay” is merely pressing one singular button; interact with the given environment that you currently occupy (say, if you’re at Vesta for example, you can hit the button to explore or interact with Vesta.) Every time you hit the button, you get a short wall of text with a little snippet of lore from that region. You can occasionally acquire items and sleeve upgrades from hitting this button, which can be used in interactions to unlock secret lore snippets only available from that sleeve upgrade or possession. That’s it. That’s the game. You fly around to different planets and get lore. However, occasionally interactions will kill you. After I believe six deaths, you die for real, and the game ends. [h1]Review[/h1] It’s a very interesting and well-executed “game” (more of an interactive art-piece, really), but it’s not worth the $10 the creator charges for it. I do not regret having played it; I enjoyed it a ton. The lore was good and it’s an interesting and fleshed-out world (or, rather, system). I say it’s not worth the money because I only got 3 hours of gameplay out of it (across a few playthroughs) before I had consumed like 90% of the lore, and the remaining snippets would be so obscenely time-consuming to access (considering you have no idea what planet or item/upgrade you need to get it, it’s just blindly pressing the interact button). I generally tell myself that there has to be at bare minimum one hour of enjoyment per dollar spent; an interactive novel that I can get 10 hours out of is worth 10 bucks at most (which is why I say at bare minimum). That’s just my own “opinion”, or whatever you would call it.

A great game for curious people, one of my favorite text games.