Topic: PHOGS (Switch) Hands-on Preview

[Daan]

Two lovable puppers deserve your undying attention.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/hands-on-preview/51574/phogs-switch-hands-on-preview

Dogs are the greatest creatures on earth. Okay, maybe that is too editorial from my side of things, but too bad. You know what is even better though? Dogs in the starring role of a video game, because I got a chance to play the delightful PHOGS. This co-op title sees you controlling one end of a two headed good boy that tries to solve tons of puzzles along the way. Simply put, what a smile it left on my face.

One or two players control the ends of a dual headed dog. You will traverse colorful landscapes, all the while using a very stretchy belly. The full game will consist of three worlds: Food, Sleep and Play. So basically, the three favorite things of any dog in existence. For the sake of our demo, we went through one of the sleep sequences, which took about 20 minutes to complete.

The gameplay was mostly puzzle platforming with a very laid back attitude. PHOGS doesn't overly punish you for failure, allowing you to try as many times as you like. You and your buddy will stretch around objects, bite into them or even in rare cases, bounce around. These three tactics are what you will be using, sometimes even combining them for some grand results. PHOGS never feels overly complicated, which is a nice change of pace. Naturally, there will be some back and forth babbling, but nothing that can overly irritate you.

And PHOGS is also fun to toy around with. You can quickly try for the objective and get the game of the way, but why would you? The power of the title is seeing the environments as sandboxes that you can explore. They will lead you in a direction, no doubt, but there is something wonderful about stretching just for the sake of it. In our demo, we couldn't stop bouncing around on any object we could find and the laughs simply kept coming.

PHOGS will release in early 2020, which bums me out just a little. The game is something I heard about a while ago, and at this point, I'm just so ready to go through with a pal. The colorful worlds and PHOGS' mechanics are joyful, and simply left me smiling all the way through the demo. Hopefully, and in time, we get to experience a whole lot more of it.