Day 74 - Puppy Dogs Tails

Pig Game, Nightmare Fuel, WTF · 13 Jul 2024

Skeeter’s Take:

Puppy Dogs Tails has a fairly straightforward concept. It does not feature any puppy, dogs, or tails but rather features frog, bugs, and pizzas.

The player takes control of a frog and can shoot out its tongue to gobble up delicious bugs for points.

The bugs have little green trails behind them that slow you if you walk through them.

It’s just a constant stream of these bugs that slither towards the player. They do not come in waves. If you lose all your lives (the little duck icons), you lose. You can restore lives at the pack-a-punch if you have the points for the upgrade:

This Pack-a-punch also upgrades your frog by making them larger!

Well, the player’s frog getting larger is likely the dev’s intended effect. In reality, everything else besides the frog shrinks to make the frog look larger. I’m still burying the lead a little. The head of the frog is the only thing that does not get affected by the Pack-a-punch shrinking upgrade. The frog’s body, which is also the main point of control for the player and also contains the frog’s hitbox, shrinks with everything else as well.

There is seemingly no limit to how many times you can hit this Pack-a-punch. This turned the goal of my game from “see how many points you can get” to “see how small you can make the screen”.

Here’s where I started:

And here’s pretty close to where I ended:

As you can see, at this microscopic level, the player has near no idea where they are controlling their frog. At this point, my gameplay consisted of wildly mashing my movement and tongue keys, hoping my pixel wide body would avoid the tiny obstacles and bugs. The main challenge was trying to maneuver my little hit box over to the pixel-dot Pack-a-punch before I lost all of my lives. If I got lucky, I’d run over a pizza pick-up (which would auto-cast the tongue attack) and have a few free seconds to spin in circles, wrack up points, and avoid any damage.

I managed to do pretty well for a while. I would pause my game to be able to get to my snipping tool without dying, and was compulsively taking screenshots when my lives got low. The above screenshot is not even the final ending point (I had the play-space even smaller), but I stupidly hit the “main menu” button instead of hitting escape and instantly lost all my progress.

We’ll never know if there truly is a cap to the “great shrinking mechanic”. Honestly, my blunder may have been more of a blessing than a curse - I didn’t really want to spend another hour blindly mashing keys on my keyboard.

Recommend: I had a sort of “compulsive” fun obsessively shrinking the screen. I did this, but I also spent an hour searching for a single door the other day. I am not a role model. Don’t be like me.

Replay Percentage Chance: 10%

Time Played: ~1 hour and 10 minutes