Sun Dogs

SUMMARY: Regretfully, Sun Dogs is a brilliant idea that's well-written and beautifully minimalist, but doesn't hang together very well because of limited options and random events. It's hard for me to not reccomend Sun Dogs as the game is a fantastic idea that almost gets it right - a kind of nonlinear playable novel of a transhuman future, beautifully written, and obviously a labor of love. Had it been free or very cheap it may have been worth it, but as it stands it's not. The idea of Sun Dogs is that one wakes up in a "Sleeve" - an artificial body. This is a far future of mind copies, artificial bodies, cybernetics, and solar-system wide travel (and then some). You explore with simple point-and-click choices, finding items, unlocking information, and seeing sights. Over time you find missions or interesting objects. The world of Sun Dogs is extremely well fleshed out, from the Jovian war to a wasted but recovering earth, to an asteroid library. There's believable terminology...

Sun Dogs is a text-based science fiction adventure game. That is the extent of how well I can describe it for an opening sentence of a review. You, as an explorer, visit different places within our inner solar system (the terrestrial four and some moons) to collect different items, skills, and body augments to open up new events and new options for events and encounters. Gameplay is presented entirely as text in well-written and imaginative exposition, like in a roleplaying game. The UI exists to show your travel locations, where you can go and interesting orbit patterns of the planets, moons, and stations, plus all your 'stats' and items. Events range from simple exposition of your environment to dangerous encounters. Having collected the right skills and items from other events lets you resolve encounters in a positive manner, rather than simply dying; however, sometimes skills and items you've acquired will cause a negative outcome to an event. This is the extent of the 'game'...

Sun Dogs is, above all, an exploration game. Set in the future when humanity is able to copy your mind into different bodies upon your death, you explore the solar system, picking up skills and knick-knacks to help you explore further. The writing is great, incredibly descriptive and evocative of the setting, and with the ease at which new mods can be created is likely to only improve over time. However, it is worth saying that the actual gameplay elements of Sun Dogs are... limited. Most of the gameplay is choosing where to go, and then clicking around a bit for the flavour text and random encounters before moving on and hoping you don't get killed - die too often, and even the most rigourously updated backup will start to corrupt. Overall, I'd say that if you enjoy trans- or post-human settings like Eclipse Phase, this will probably be the closest you get to a game in that setting for a while, and for what it is, it is most certainly worth checking out.

The game is like a free roam, text-based adventure, where there is no storyline, few side quests and infinite combinations of collectibles. Excellent world building, but there isn't much to do in the world.

The premise of Sun Dogs sounds fantastic, but the game itself was disappointing. You are at the mercy of random events, and rely on the roll of dice for gains and losses.

https://youtu.be/t0mFVtUduGA Sun Dogs is a text adventure scifi game with some neat visuals to represent the solar system you are going about in. The story unfolds through you exploring moons and planets in our solar system and all of this plays to the backdrop of some great music. I enjoyed this with a reservation, there is a tutorial but it is so limited that during my time playing I recieved some items and skills and had no idea how to use them to affectr the outcome of anything. A lot of the game is like that you need to figure it out yourself. Once you get in that mindset then it's fine, but I do wonder at them having a tutorial that teaches you very little. The first mission might have been an excellent way of hand holdig you through what to do. Maybe this isn't the point but I do feel like I wasted a lot of time figuring stuff out rather than enjoying it. There were a couple of minor bugs where it couldn't find the story files but that was never game breaking and was only a m...

Okay, this game is pretty amazing. If the description of it sounds interesting to you at all, do yourself a favor and give it a try. I HIGHLY recommend it.

Mentioning a theme is not exploring a theme, and disjoint passages you have no control over isn't a game. This is like a series of tweet-length passages about a world, printed out and strewn on the floor, then when you've read a certain amount of them, they all catch on fire and a new copy of the same notes is thrown on the ground. I don't wish to be unduly cruel, but if an experience isn't fun, it's not fun. If you're okay reading through an experience that randomly resets, not "death isn't the end" but just flat-out resets, then it might be for you, but I wouldn't recommend it.

A great game for curious people, one of my favorite text games.

This is an interesting and entertaining short game, though not one without some quirks. If you liked the novel, The Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniemi I think you will enjoy this game. Like that novel, the game is set in a distant future where advancing technologies have made humanity into something vastly different. In Sundogs the player's mind is downloaded into designer bodies (called cortical stacks and sleeves, game terms I presume were borrowed from the novel Altered Carbon). These stacks can be uploaded for literal save points. Die, and you are given a new sleeve with all the memories and skills retained from your last upload. And like these novels, Sundogs invokes it post-human vistas with words. This is a text adventure across a post-human solar system, where the player has a choice of destinations, whether they be roving mines on the surface of Mercury, asteroid colonies so old no one remembers who first colonized them, partially flooded arcologies or vibrant orbital const...