Dead Pets by Triple Topping, Akupara Games
So, in the ’80s, I was a punk. Actually, that’s a total lie; I certainly listened to punk and New Wave, but it’s not like I swanned about wearing my hair in a Mohawk with safety pins in my ears. I was a game nerd, of course, playing tabletop for the most part, and early PC games.
One of the places I used to play games was on Bleecker Street in New York, a place called The Battleground, just two blocks away from CBGB’s – where I never went. Decades later, a girlfriend and I figured out that we were probably just blocks away when we were in our teens, but she was listening to The Ramones at CBGBs, and I was playing D&D at The Battleground. One of us was cool, and it wasn’t me.
One of the things I find a little odd about Dead Pets (in a bemused way) is the game’s continuing commitment to the idea that punk is cool, transgressive, and radical. It once was, of course, but surely the cool kids are now listening to boom bap or EDM or something. But okay, we’re all in the magic circle, so in Dead Pets, punk is still the thing, and I can’t really say I mind, because its soundtrack is definitely driving and noisy in that old punk way, which I like a lot. So yes, I’m pre-inclined to like the game and its theme.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die
In Dead Pets, you play as Gordy, a punk rock bassist for a band called, you guessed it, Dead Pets. She’s just turned 30, the band is going nowhere, and she’s having a bit of an early midlife crisis, not wanting to give up her commitment to punk and its aesthetic, but kind of wondering if it makes sense to keep on doing this and, you know, maybe she should get a real job.
She and all the other game characters are demons, apparently. Gordy has horns; some others look weirder.
The main spine of the game is a visual novel; you encounter other characters, make dialogue choices, and advance the story. VN sequences are side-scrolling left-and-right, and four stats are tracked: money (of which Gordy is perennially short), “Gordy” (presumably how chill she is), “social” (social connections), and “band” (which seemingly affects outcomes when the band plays).
There’s a city map you can use to move quickly from one location to another; amusingly, a miniversion of Gordy is held in pincers, dangling above the map, and you drop her where you want her to go, with an audio wail as she plummets to her destination.
You want to keep them all up, of course, but critical decision points generally require you to make tradeoffs, and really, keeping solvent seems like a lost cause, between things like urgent dental care and paying the cost of releasing your first EP.
Learn Three Chords, Don’t Quit Your Day Job
The game has two main minigames and a bunch of smaller ones. In minigames, the VN version of Gordy is replaced with a smaller, kawaii version of her.
One is a rhythm game, played during band practice. Icons fly at you right-to-left, on a lower tier and an upper one, and you have to try to hit different buttons to hit the upper and lower notes at the right moment. As far as I can tell, your score doesn’t matter much.
Your bandmates may say something like “Well, we sucked,” but the story advances regardless. You do get a score, and from the main menu, you can play any of the tracks in the game (once unlocked) in rhythm mode when you want, but this is optional (maybe useful if you want to practice), and presumably provided as a gameplay mode for people who are really into the rhythm game (cough, eh, not me).
The second recurring minigame is basically a Diner Dash clone: you work at a diner and earn money from playing the minigame, trying to keep your ever-growing debt down to not-insane levels. Gameplay is what you’d expect: seat customers, collect orders, bring them to the counter, grab dishes from the counter to deliver to tables, collect money.
A couple of fillips; sometimes customers ask for pie (grab from a location on the counter) or drinks (hold down a button for a while to fill it), and on some levels, there’s trash on the tables you need to clear in order to serve food there. As a minigame, it…doesn’t suck…but of course, if I wanted to play Diner Dash, I’d play Diner Dash(originally designed by Nick Fortugno and released through Eric Zimmerman’s GameLab, and actually pretty innovative in its day).
Out of Control
Which brings up another point: Although the game supports a mouse-and-keyboard interface, do not even attempt to play it that way. As far as I can tell, it is only available through Steam, but it works so much better with a controller that it’s foolish to try to play it any other way. As an example, the tables in the Diner Dash minigame are arranged at an angle; not so hard to navigate around them quickly with a joystick, but really awkward with WASD controls.
Another example: one of the first minigames you encounter is “apply condiments to a hot dog,” with the hot dog at an angle down the screen; again, easy enough to apply mustard along the angle with a joystick, but much harder with WASD.
There are, at times, modest and humorous body horror moments, as when Gordy visits the dentist, which also result in more trivial minigames, e.g., flossing to remove a cute critter of some kind stuck between your teeth, which whimpers in agony as you work. Or another minigame in which you bounce an ovum off what I guess is a diaphragm.
There’s also a bit when your band manager engages in non-consensual behavior with you, which is a bit icky, but not to an “OMG, call the cops, I need therapy” level.
Can’t Be Saved
The game does not allow save slots at random moments, but does autosave at the end of a gameplay day. However, playing through a whole day can take you some time, and if, say, you shut down the game in the middle of a game day because you need to go AFK to cook dinner for your family, you can lose progress and have to restart at the beginning of the game day (happened to me).
This is a failing; ideally, you should be able to save at any time, and failing that, “continue” saving should be more granular. Replaying content you’re already seen isn’t fun. (This is something I whine about in a lot of games; this is the 21st century, I’ve got basically unlimited space for save files even on consoles, so there’s really no excuse for games that don’t permit saves at any time.)
The Verdict:
Gordy is angsty, but mostly cheerful, and her bandmates are interesting characters, as are some of the other characters you encounter. I would not describe the story as particularly deep or all that emotionally impactful, but at the end of the day, my response was “that was kind of fun,” and what more do you want from a game?
If you’d enjoy listening to some pretty decent punk tracks, playing a rhythm minigame, exploring the angsty life of an aspiring musician, and you like visual novels, you’ll like Dead Pets.
Dead Pets is available via Steam.
Check out the official trailer for Dead Pets below:
