Wobbledogs: The Game Where You Wobble Some Dogs

Look man, sometimes you just need a game where you breed multi-headed, brashly-coloured dogs that can barely walk. Sometimes you need to pick those dogs up and fling them about the place. Sometimes that's the only thing that really helps.

Enter: Wobbledogs. A bright and colourful, CalArts-adjacent wonder in which dogs lay eggs and machines pump out slices of yummy garlic bread. It's a simple, addictive sandbox game, and your only task is to bring dogs to life, and watch them shit out neat pink poo piles.

Much of the fun comes in breeding them. At first they are beautifully simple little cartoon creatures with respectable rectangular bodies. But very soon they are mutated freaks, lunging and falling over and making horrible grimaces. They are undoubtedly in great pain. Yet they are charming. They're weird. The first time you grow a dog with a fluffy tail, you'll gasp. The sweet wonder of life made new again.

What I love about Wobbledogs is that those dogs are a sort of alien approximation of what a dog might be. They are facsimiles of dogs. They can have wings and tendrils and many heads. They lay eggs. They spin themselves into cocoons which hatch new, slightly mutated versions of the previous dogs.

Yet, for all this eldritch and un-doglike behaviour, they eat and play and snarl and defecate, and you, the player, watch silently. Hatch a new dog egg, why don't you? It'll be fun.

There's a love letter to the sciences in this that shines through even in the colouring, which reminds me of the bold, toddler-friendly sections you can find in most good science museums. The perfect reminder of the sheer fun and delight to be found in genetics. It's funny, really, that I can take generations of mangled mutts and craft them into the perfect tiny-headed, long-legged block of cuteness.

I made this dog. Now I shall wobble it. Good day.