To understand One Dog Story you have to go back a few years ago. Not that they were days of wine and roses, but there was a more optimistic environment regarding the possibilities of games by small and unknown developers, thanks to tools such as
Steam Greenlight and the possibility of financing projects with crowdfunding like Kickstarter. Unfortunately, many took advantage of that open door and while m
ore and more precarious projects asked for more and more, the fans were distrusting to the same extent. The result was a trail of failed projects. This title was one of them.
And yet, that disappointment did not make a dent in the mood of the Russian-American team Big Way games, a studio with no background to show but that despite this they have combined this project with the most ambitious RPG Steampunk
“Steam Hammer” (the which has been funded on Kickstarter with a more ambitious goal of $ 50,000 and is scheduled to launch this year).
They said a year ago that without the 30,000 euros that they requested, the game could not materialize, but shortly after they rectified and, once they a
chieved the green light of Steam, they developed the title that we are analyzing here. A possibly less ambitious bet than the one they once had in mind, with good ideas but an execution that falls short.
A proposal of science fiction
Mixing elements of science fiction captured in a post-apocalyptic setting, and with a premise that seems to be inspired by the very popular novel by Mikhail Bulgákov, Dog’s Heart, which narrates the experiment that transforms a stray dog into a human.
The protagonist, identified only as EO-43, awakens without memories of his past in the middle of a laboratory destroyed and infested with monsters. Under this premise, we must first armed with a simple truncheon and then better and more ag
gressive weaponry, ending the hordes that will tour the scenarios making our progress as far as their artificial intelligence lacks, something very forgiva
ble in a game that it drinks both the 8 and 16 bit platforms but it also shows the conformism of the game in all aspects.
The original ambition of the proposal in the mind of Big Way is reflected in the titles and genres that developers use as a reference to define their idea: Cave Story, Contra, Metroid …
Unfortunately, the result is far from reaching the levels of quality and playability that encumbraron those titles . Our journey
through the laboratory in the skin of EO-43 divides the time in equal parts in approaching listening to the complaints of survivors or
reading the abandoned texts on computer screens or newspapers abandoned by the staff to learn new aspects of the story; and the purely action / platform part.
The scenarios, although they break the horizontality with an abundant use of elevating platforms, are quite linear and in general, ev
ery time we find a closed door or an obstacle to our progress, we simply have to go back to a door that we have left behind, after a small kill of enemies and something of plataformeo, get us with the card / pass, switch that allows us to continue.
Despite the omnipresent history , told not only through all the messages in the laboratory, but also flashbacks in the memory of EO-43 to Breath of the
Wild, it does not get to hook too much . Better luck have run the moments of action , where we will be charged to shots or shots to the
multiple bugs that cross our path. Unfortunately the ammunition will prevent us from going completely crazy to the Contra, one of the references.
