Pupperazzi - Dog Instagram Review

Pupperazzi is a product that only makes sense in the form of a video game, and even so many people watch it with amazement. A game about painting dogs - who would have thought of that without Nintendo? Pupperazi starts out crazy: the dog in the raincoat explains how the photos are taken, and then sends me to take photos of everything around me. We have several smaller locations at my disposal that we need to unlock gradually, and each is filled with several different breeds. Photographing dogs is the main task, but not the only one. We were surprised that the game has some platformer challenges and forces the player to explore the environment for the best possible position from which to paint dogs.

Pupperazzi manages to extract some silly tasks from the photography itself. For example, we had to find and paint a large monster in a lake that eventually turned out to be a large dog in a fish costume. Or we had to gather more dogs in one location and entertain them with toys. Each location in the game has four different times of the day, each with different tasks and occasions. At night we photographed a ghost dog in the park, while during the day we could run into dogs that have a concert. Each time of the day had a different atmosphere and lighting which affected the main part of the game - photography.

There are really great possibilities that the game offers when choosing filters and lenses for photography. All these options were not available from the beginning, but had to be unlocked, which allowed each filter and lens to come to the fore and be tested. Of course some we liked more than others, but again a good approach which made me sure which lens and filter we wanted. The way we unlocked it all was the golden bones we would get after solving the task or we would find them scattered around the locations the same way we unlocked the extra task. Although it is not necessary to collect everything to “switch” the game, unlocking everything was a quick process because the game is really generous with golden bones.

In addition to the golden bones, there are also followers that unlock new locations and new times of the day. Every time we caught a photo I had the opportunity to publish it and get followers for it. After that we had a few options: we could save the image so we could see it after we left the site (all unsaved images are deleted after leaving) or we could manually delete it and free up space for other images. Now we were honestly a little weird that we were limited to a few pictures per location, because if we wanted to we could have abused that system by painting, posting and deleting one and the same picture and so going through the game even faster than we did.

After going through the game in 20 minutes in the first pass so we were just solving tasks we were amazed that there is so little in it. Then we started from the beginning, but with a different approach: we were slowly trying to capture the best possible pictures, and the devil took him away - We had fun with Pupperazzi. Only then could we notice the relaxing atmosphere and take advantage of the wide range of painting options that combined make for a pleasant experience. We painted thousands of pictures, some almost identical with small iterations and didn’t get bored until we had an idea of ​​what we could paint.

Preparing before the painting itself, deciding what kind of picture we want and looking for the perfect picture was quite a fun experience. Every decision in the game was related to whether we wanted to capture a photo in the city, whether we wanted to take it at night, what kind of FOV we were looking for, how my four-legged model was dressed. All these little details affected whether the picture would be just good or great. Of course, we didn’t have to pay attention to any of that and go through the game just by taking pictures of what the game tells me without taking my pictures into account but then we would ignore the main goal the game tries to achieve, be relaxing and try to make all other worries go away.

Game problems - lack of animation. All the dogs were in the same position and whatever they did, be it sleeping, walking, even riding a scooter, their poses in the pictures were always the same. Along with that, the problem is the really minimal amount of what to offer with painting, because each location is quite small, so after my will to paint passed, we had nothing else to do.

In reality, Pupperazi has nothing concrete to offer. This experience is very short and falls into the category of “started the game once, finished it and we will probably never touch it again”. Even if we try to play it again, we doubt that we would discover anything new because it is so short, and the audience for which the game is targeted is specific.