Although we at Gamereactor have mostly chosen to focus on cat-related games lately (especially after Editor-in-Chief Hegevall recently expressed his love for our purring friends), that doesn’t mean we avoid adventures involving other animals. than just cats.
Dogurai is, as the title suggests, a game starring a dog, and if you think the name sounds familiar, it’s because the game has actually been out on the market for a couple of years at this point. Already in 2019 it was launched for PC and with the following year it was also released for Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch. However, it is only now in the shadow of the recently concluded Xbox launch that we have managed to come across a code for the adventure in question, and it is thus only now that we can tell you whether the wait has been worth it or not.
As I’ve already revealed, you take on the role of a dog in Dogurai, but don’t expect any ordinary little furball who likes to pick up the newspaper and beg at the dining table in this cozy indie lair. The character you play is both a dog and a samurai, and in addition to fluffy ears and a wagging tail, our antagonist is armed with a razor-sharp katana sword that is used to cleave everything from tanks to robots to tiny pieces. In terms of gameplay, you get a lot from old-school action platformers like Mega Man and Ninja Gaiden, and it’s mostly about switching between managing clever jump maneuvers and discarding various enemies to the digital afterlife. The concept is almost as old and proven as the medium it operates in, and for those looking for nostalgia, this is an excellent adventure to lose yourself in for a couple of hours.
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However, everything is not gold and green forests if you choose to ignore the nostalgic memories and look at the situation soberly. Sure, the game mechanics are top notch and the pace is generally very good, but unfortunately you suffer from some diseases that have plagued the genre since time immemorial. Here and there there are sequences that are obviously only there to drag out the playing time, and in the past the purpose was to increase the degree of difficulty so that you didn’t reach the end credits too quickly and feel like you’re missing out on the candy. Because the game market looked different back in the day, and when you usually only bought a single game per year, the challenge was a way to feel that you were getting value for your money.
Dogurai is certainly not a particularly difficult game at all, but in a couple of places I think it is obvious that some unnecessary speed bumps have been put in place to hinder the player’s progress without offering more entertainment for the sake of it. For example, there was an unnecessarily awkward jump in one of the levels where you had to dodge an enemy and then, at just the right time, jump from one falling platform to another. The crux was that as soon as you stood on the platform it started to fall, and this meant that you (for some reason) couldn’t reverse your double jump like you’ve been able to all the time before. It’s an extremely small detail when you write it out like this in text, but when the flow stops and forces you to replay the exact same section over and over again, it quickly goes from retro fun to unnecessary and annoying.
However, the presentation deserves an incredible amount of praise as they have captured the aesthetics of old Game Boy classics in the very best way without being limited by the ancient hardware that developers were in the past. The graphics are nice and the levels are stylish, and the changing color tone from course to course does a lot to set the different environments apart from each other. Even the music deserves an extra plus as you offer catchy 8-bit tones that both make your feet swing to the beat at the same time as your conscious mind is swallowed back to the early 90s and memories of playing Mega Man on your sun-bleached Game Boy.
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Finally, Dogurai succeeds in exactly what it aims for. They’ve built a nostalgic retro flirt that mixes the best of yesteryear with a couple of clever modern additions, and if you like old school adventure then this is a great addition to your collection. However, don’t expect anyone to blow you off your chair, but if the motto “more of the same” and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” has worked for you over the past 30 years, then Dogurai will taste good from the first to last frame.
