They/Them, AuDHD, 21+.
While I like edgy aesthetics I'm pretty shy all things considered. I have a lot of hope and feel a spiritual connection with humanity, and like exploring how trauma can be healed from, even when it creates a lot of darkness within you.
Hey you~! My name is Haze, which is a name I share with my persona Walker. As such, when I post about Walker, I call them by their last name. I use they/them and one/ones pronouns, though I am pretty fluid with the gendered language I use for myself because sometimes the vibes just demand it. I am married and am a bit obnoxiously in love with my wife so I am sorry but also I am lying about being sorry.
I am a writer first and foremost and am most comfortable engaging with art through writing, however I also like to make a go at drawing too. When I draw it tends to either be very cutesy or very edgy, though I've also been experimenting with pixel art lately too! My favorite genres to work in are Romance and Horror, there is just something about them that scratch my brain, but I also am DEEPLY involved in paranormal settings (thanks creepypasta upbringing). My favorite thing in the world to do is create OCs and World Build, I am less... Consistent, about DOING anything with the stuff I make,,, But I am TRYING To get better about it!!
I also really love analyzing content and am prone to overanalyzing things haha, so I may yap about that a bit on here...
This is a 21+ account! I like exploring dark themes and am Anti-Censorship. The block button is your best friend!
Talk to me about OCs, the enneagram, unfiction of any kind, mythological monsters, animals (but especially wolves),and vocaloid (including PJSK), and you will activate yap mode (this is a threat).
Working on a WIP short story to shake off the cobwebs of "haven't written anything that wasn't an rp response or world building in a long time" and I managed to write 2,567 words in 2 hours! I'm really proud of myself because I only wanted to challenge myself to write 2k. I actually sped up near the end too, having written about 500 per half hour until the last half hour when I wrote an entire 1,000 words in just that time frame. I'm very happy with myself rn.
Me: Wow, I sure am well rested and ready to do 1 of the 2 chores I told my wife I would do while she is at work! Nothing could possibly go wrong--
My chronic pain after 10 minutes of doing anything: Arent you... forgetting someone... 👁🫦👁
Me: :^) Ah yes. Silly me.
I swear being disabled is such a joke sometimes because I literally spent all day mostly doing nothing but resting, finally got up the will to try and process the 10lbs of ground beef I bought because it was on sale into individual 1 - 2lb bags so it'll be easier to thaw them for meals, and tell me why I literally am in excruciating pain after having packaged up 3/4ths of the bags? I had to put the last couple in the fridge with the meat just stuffed in (not rolled out yet) just so I could get it off my counter and away from my cats who are trying to switch to a raw food diet because I was starting to get Dizzy and struggle to breathe due to how much pain my back is in... It makes me wanna scream it's so unfair. I feel so helpless all the time. If it's not physical it's mental...
Age: I play her anywhere between 14 and 36 years old, she is her oldest age in these pictures.
Height: 5'7"
Personality: 2w1 SO/SX 296, she is gentle most of the time but she has balls of steel when necessary. She cries a lot, whether through anger, joy, or sadness. She believes that no one is beyond redemption, and that kindness and hope are choices worth continuing to choose again and again. Socks, the wolf anima that resides in her, acts as her self preservation, and is just a touch arrogant and haughty, but defers to Rose's desires whenever it isn't a matter of safety.
(I'm omitting or glossing over the most triggering content but cw: Mentions of death, human trafficking, grooming, and medical abuse)
Summary: Born to a couple who had no history of hosting anima in their family, they had no idea what to do with her when she developed her anima after she was born. They feared she would be discovered as a freak, and so moved to live in a remote part of Alaska, where they raised her for the first 11 years of her life. At that point, they both died one right after another, with Rose finding both of their bodies first herself, and of course blaming herself for it.
Having no where to go, she simply decided to try to make a go of living in the woods, but ends up getting sold by a seemingly kindly trapper to a local facility that tests on supernatural folks. There she underwent medical torture and your typical mad scientist style genetic tampering, all the while being slowly drawn into a deeply inappropriate relationship with her head researcher. After a year of being there she was pushed too far and managed to start an uprising where she got all the other subjects to work together with her and overtake the facility before making a break for it.
This pack, as they came to be called, lived together as feral children in the wild for several years until through a horrible attack motivated by hate they are nearly completely wiped out, with only Rose surviving. Devastated, she eventually is lonely enough to start wandering into local towns where she meets an elderly lesbian librarian who takes her in. From there she finally gets an education, learns she wants to spend the rest of her life helping people, and decides she is going to become a trauma specialist.
I referenced the wolf mouth but the human (adjacent) mouths I totally winged. My initial desire was to try and mimic the same vibes as the wolf mouth but I ended up struggling too hard with it so this is what came out instead. Practicing for a piece I want to do.
Well, I attempted to draw a hybrid animal using that trending generator. I gave up halfway through Coloring bc my wrist started hurting, but I feel like this thing probably is semiaquatic and lives in an extremely humid swampland on an alien planet that is quite colorful. I imagine it to be around 7 feet at the shoulder and very wide built. It can climb trees if needed. What would you name this?
In a sentence, my opinion is as follows: it somehow manages to make the wrong decision at every single opportunity, which is honestly impressive in its own right, but that doesn't stop it from being depressing.
Indepth review under the cut
Introduction
I have always been someone who loves to nurture something in a video game. Whether those video games are necessarily designed with that in mind didn't matter to me, I would still often put my video game characters through routines of self care because I wanted them to feel their best regardless of whether it increased their stat points, and any game that featured some kind of explicit section that focused on nurturance like the Chao Garden of Sonic Adventure 2? I spent more time in that damn garden than I ever did actually playing the levels, I would just replay the same levels over and over again to get stuff for my babies. I say all of this to make it clear that while I am going to be talking about virtual pet sims here, I am not just a pet sim guy and I also am willing to take absolute SCRAPS when it comes to feeling fulfilled in taking care of a bunch of pixels on a screen. Understanding this will make my utter and complete disappointment in this game even more scathing.
Game Description
My Universe - Puppies & Kittens is allegedly a game about, well, let's take a look at a screenshot of the official store page's description together shall we?
This description, really paying attention to it now, should have been my first red flag. It is an absolute mess. But worse than the bad writing is the fact that it is entirely misleading and alludes to gameplay elements that are simply not in this. Let's fact check it.
Can you adopt both cats and dogs in this game? ✅️
Can you raise these animals/do they grow? ❌️ (They stay puppies and kittens forever as the title suggests, but like also why would you use that wording unless you were suggesting otherwise?)
Can you cuddle these animals? ✅️..ish
Can you educate/teach tricks to the dogs? ✅️
Does each animal have a unique personality? ❔️
Can you put your animals into Competitions? ✅️
Do these tricks have ANYTHING to do with the competitions??? ❌️❌️❌️❌️
Can you take your dog out for a walk? ✅️
Can you interact with other owners? ❌️
I will get further into depth with these comments when I get into the gameplay section of the review... But reading this, paired with even a cursory look at the screenshots immediately brings attention to an elephant in the room.
The Nintendog Elephant
So, this game is clearly a rip off of nintendogs, right? I would not blame you in the slightest for thinking that, as I originally had it sold to me as a switch dup that was made sense it got left behind on the 3DS. And boy, as someone who loved me some nintendogs, that was very appealing. And it certainly does look the part, and at least have the aesthetics of similar gameplay, but if you scratch the surface you will quickly see how thin of a layer of gold foil is covering this piece of shit. Which really baffles me because like, if they just genuinely made an effort to copy what worked in nintendogs but put their own spin on it then it would've been fine, but instead they focused on making it look similar enough it would trick people into buying it. Playing it for any length of time feels like biting into a supposedly name brand food only to find out your mom replaced it with the great value version thinking you'd not notice. I fucking noticed.
The Breakdown
The Graphics
I take a few things into account when evaluating graphics.
Visual appeal
Distinctive identity
Legibility of what is interactive
Tonal consistency
Recognizability of what is depicted (Especially in more stylized games)
This game has, for the most part, very little wrong in this department. It's polished looking, has a cute semi realistic art style that suits the subject matter, and everything is very clear in whether you can touch it and you can tell what it is at a glance. The It lacks its own real identity visually compared to other games in its genre as where it isn't pretending to be nintendogs it falls into the same visual trappings of like minded pet sims, but that by itself isn't that big of a deal given the expectation in this exact genre that they are going to be somewhat samey. The other complaint comes from the way that the longer I played the more kind of... Empty? I found the art? Perhaps my opinions were heavily biased by my gameplay experience, but the animals just looked. Dead in the eyes. In a way that crept into my mind and started to unnerve me the longer I stared.
But overall it is a relatively minor detail to pick at, so all in all I have nothing all that negative to say about the design, I just also have nothing particularly positive to say about it either. It's just fine. So 1 point removed for being overall nothing to write about and 1 removed for being kind of unoriginal and lowkey triggering my uncanny valley response (which I will be the first to admit is very sensitive in me).
The Gameplay
Oh now this one is a doozy. I value the following factors in gameplay.
Does it Work as Intended?
Are the mechanics either intuitive or taught to you in a way that the game could expect the player to build their skills naturally?
Do the mechanics make sense for the subject matter?
Are the mechanics Accessible?
Does this game do anything new or interesting with its mechanics that makes it stand out against others of its ilk?
I was constantly fighting the game to try and pet the animals the way I wanted to. It would often register me as if I was trying to get the dog to roll over when all I wanted was to pet it and that would interrupt the flow of the experience and caused frustration on my end, but otherwise it seemed to be in working order.
The mechanics are easy enough to perform, but could one call them intuitive? I believe that would be a stretch. Some are, such as walking on a leash just requires you to pull your leash to the left or right to steer your dog, or dragging a cat teaser across the floor to be chased. Then you have the semi intuitive ones, like pouring the food and water into a bowl. Most pet games would just show an animation, but this one expects you to tilt the bag or bottle until the bowl is full, which is designated by an audio cue. While this is simple, it is never explained that you need to wait for the audio cue, and if you fail your pets simply side eye you with a displeased emoji and we get no further elaboration on our mistake. I made this mistake 3 times before I finally understood what was needed because I tend to play video games with no real stand out OST with my own music playing, so it was muted. The least intuitive mechanic was playing fetch, as it requires you to shake the ball back and forth until you fill a meter up and then press a button to launch it. Why? What is wrong with allowing the player to throw the ball? What purpose does this serve??? If there was some kind of trial involved where you had to throw the ball a certain distance in order to have your dog catch it or something, such as the frisbee competition in Nintendogs, I could possibly consider it a matter of manufacturing difficulty, but no! There is no such competition, and there is no purpose to this mechanic other than perhaps it gives the illusion of a more technically complex game? I am baffled by this decision.
By and large the mechanics present do make sense for the subject matter. You need to be able to feed and water your pets, and you can do that. You need to be able to take your dogs on walks, and you can do that. You need to be able to play with your pets, and you can do that, and the ways in which you play with them such as throwing a ball, pointing a laser, tugging on a rope, all make sense and are accompanied with mechanics that are serviceable for facilitating those actions. It meets the bare minimum expectations of itself required by its genre, but no more. I will say though that the fact you cannot play with multiple animals simultaneously feels like an oversight for a game where you can house up to 5 animals in your home at the same time, and the fact you have to choose to throw the ball for the same dog over and over again when you recall them rather than just instantly taking you back to the throwing menu is an odd design choice as well that lends a clunky feeling to the gameplays flow. I was also surprised that this game wasn't in real time? I was so fully expecting it to be tied to some kind of passage of time, but genuinely there isn't, which could be a perk to some but I personally dislike it.
Other than the previously mentioned audio cue that isn't paired with any visual cue around filling their food and water, this game is fairly accessible. There are no explicit accessibility options but you can go into the settings and change each individual audio setting independently, from music to sound effects to the ambient soundscape. The game is also translated into multiple languages other than English. All UI is fairly high contrast and tied to specific buttons on your controller. There is an autosave and a pause button, though I have no idea what you'd need to pause for since nothing is ever time sensitive.
And this game does absolutely nothing that I haven't seen in a pet sim before, nor does it do anything interesting with what it has.
I like the fact there are multiple save file slots, which allows you to adopt all the breeds across several save slots since you do cap out at 5 pets per household. I also like that you unlock new breeds as you progress in the game, and that progression is directly tied to loving on your pet through taking care of them. I like that there are different routes you can walk your dog on. These are staple traits I would be happy to see in any other pet sim. However, it is hard to really appreciate these when the fun factor is so abysmal.
The Fun Factor
Oh god. Okay so, you know the drill.
Do the mechanics lend to the games enjoyment?
Are you rewarded by the game for engaging in its content?
Do you have an appropriate amount of player agency over the outcomes of your adventures?
Does it feel satisfying to make progress, be it through completing gameplay tasks or through skill building?
Could I ever see myself spending a lot of hours on this game, whether it be through replaying or continuing on the same save file?
As I stated in the gameplay mechanics section, playing with your pets can be kind of a chore, which is a wild problem to have in a pet sim. But that's not all. Walking your dog? There is no way to speed up or slow down, just go and stop, left and right. You are given the illusion of agency when you see puddles and smelly grass patches your dog wants to visit, thinking aha, I can keep my dog from getting dirty, but when you return home from your walk (which takes far too long for you to be doing absolutely nothing other than steering your dog the entire time) your dog will always be filthy regardless of whether you avoided hazards. This makes the walk feel entirely pointless, since if you simply let the dog run amuck without holding the leash at all they will sniff what they want to sniff and find the present in the same bush they always do regardless of your input. Once you've gotten all the presents, of which there is genuinely a limited amount, there seems to be no discernable point from my end to walking them, as all it does is make your pet dirty, tired, and thirsty. So you are rewarded from doing a chore with more chores.
Which brings me to my next point, the fact that every single chore in this game feels like it's here explicitly because Nintendogs has this chore, not because they care whether it's any fun to do. You can wash your dog because you can in Nintendogs, but you can only wash one half of the dog and it takes less than 1 minute. You can go on walks because you can in Nintendogs, but you can't actually GO anywhere. And they are straight up lying to you about the way you can supposedly run into other owners on walks, you just run into a dog that's tied to a fence post or something and your dog will bounce around for a second and sniff it before you continue on your walk. You can choose to feed your dog premium vs normal food, spring water vs tap, but there is no benefit to using one over the other, unless of course you consider that You Can Do This In Nintendogs. Hell! You can train your dog (getting to that in a second), but there is no competition to place them in to see this training become useful! You can teach your dog to fetch, but no competition to throw a ball or frisbee for.
Speaking of competitions... The only competition in the game is a memory game where you are given 10 seconds to memorize an outfit a pet is wearing, then are given 3 different sets of multiple choice options as to what the pet was wearing. That's it. You don't even earn money from participating because this game forgoes money all together, making that previously mentioned premium food even sillier. You have infinite of both food types! So even if there was a marked difference in the happiness gained by eating one over the other, it would be negated by the fact you earn premium food and spring water literally in the first 20 minutes of playing the damn game, because this game operates on a level up to earn access to more items metric... And you just level up by caring for your animals. So the gameplay loop is literally just walk your dog, bathe it, water it, feed it, play with it, pet it, let it sleep, do the entire thing all over again with the next dog... And maybe play with your cat, as it does nothing other than look cute. Which is not a unique problem to this game but I digress. This is why you get multiple profiles and multiple animals per profile, simply because you just run out of stuff to do so quickly! Especially taking into consideration how TRAINING works...
So when you want to train your dog you bring up the tricks menu, then clicking on the trick you want to teach which MUST ALWAYS be in the same order btw, you are then greeted with a "say command" prompt which involves a button input... And then a quick time event where you must drag your cursor over the dots on the screen before the timer runs out. That's it. You do it twice for the first couple tricks, then 3 times for future tricks. This could be interesting if there was any kind of difficulty increase or there was a tournament where you'd have to remember the motion to get your dog to do the trick again, but neither are present. Once you've taught them the trick you just say it through prompting the trick menu again, and it will do the command. Even more insulting is that you can teach it to do left vs right paw, but the command QTE is literally IDENTICAL, they didn't have the decency to mirror it!! What purpose is there to forcing me to do this twice? Not to mention that you can teach all the tricks the dog can learn all in a row in under 20 minutes, and boom you never have to deal with that mechanic again! And if that doesn't grind my gears enough, there is supposedly a personality referred to as bright in the game that is meant to suggest the dog is more trainable, but it has NO EFFECT on the training, nor does the fiery personality which is supposedly making them extra difficult to work with. But I will talk about personality stuff under the cozy factor...
As my ranting might lead you to understand, there is very little satisfaction to be had in progressing in this game, and you unlock all mechanics so quickly into playing nothing feels particularly new other than, get this... Hats, collars, and sunglasses. That's what you're working to earn. Also technically toys and new breeds of pet. But when all the toys are just reskins of ones you start with, that too becomes a matter of just customization and nothing more. And don't get me wrong, I love a cute outfit to put my animal in, and I love collecting all the goodies, but there is just. No actual incentive to do this. It feels like it was tacked on as an after thought.
Technically the game gives you exactly one incentive to do anything. A mission list, which is full of a bunch of the most straight forward chores imaginable, like "own one of each kind of personality" and "have 3 different breeds of dog in your care". And your reward is just more points towards accessories and whatnot.
So to answer the ultimate question of whether I'd ever play this game for any length of time... I played it for 3 hours over the course of two days, and after the honey moon of the first hour wore off I spent the rest of the time realizing with growing dread that this game sucks actually.
The Cozy Factor
Alright home stretch.
Does it fulfill a fantasy?
Does it feel nostalgic, comforting, warm, and/or sentimental?
Is it relaxing and/or easy to get into a gameplay loop where you are locked in?
Is it immersive enough to make me forget about the outside world a little bit?
Is it customizable enough of an experience that I can tailor it to my tastes?
Initially, things looked really cozy with this game. I was so excited for the idea of the pets having different personalities, I was looking forward to seeing each of my pets interacting with one another with that in mind, and generally I had my bar set really low (or so I thought). All I wanted was the game to just, do what it said it was going to do. And somehow it failed me at every turn. The personalities do technically seem to have some level of genuine coding behind them, they're not lying about the idea of their behavior being slightly different, but it's so subtle and doesn't effect literally anything that matters that it may as well not exist at all. Also, the animals do not interact with each other at all while in your home! It's like they can't even see each other. When you put a bowl of food out, you're only ever feeding one specific pet at a time, and when you play you can only play with One Fucking Pet. What is the point of having multiple animals if they are going to treat each other like they don't exist? You may as well give me entirely different houses!
I do like the fact you can go into the garden or the indoors, but ultimately that change in scenery is entirely pointless as well other than giving your cat different shit to knock over when you're playing with them. Same thing with choosing what trail to walk your pet on, it's just different scenery like whooo... trees... ooooh... houses... zzzz
This may be being pedantic, but it's kind of one of those if the rest of the game didn't suck I wouldn't mind as much, but also the way you teach them tricks is super immersion breaking to me. It's insinuating you're dangling the treat in such a way that it's encouraging your dog to do the trick, which is a real training technique, but then it reverses the order of operations by having you state the command first before having them do it, rather than waiting until they do it to tell them the command and giving them the treat. It'd literally be as simple as just swapping the order of when you press the bottom to say command, so I don't get why they'd do it in the order they do.
This game quickly turned from nostalgic to depressing for me, as I just wished I was playing a different game. It also just doesn't really do it for me with regards to fulfilling the fantasy of owning a pet, as the animals just feel really shallow and like they don't care about you at all. Also, once again a tiny complaint, but I also just think the accessories leave a lot to be desired, but there are some cute ones.
Concluding Thoughts
I wanted to like this game so bad man. I kept trying to convince myself that maybe I just wasn't seeing the vision as I played, but the problems just kept mounting. It isn't hard to make a serviceable pet sim, hell I played Catz and Dogz 5 back when I was a little kid and that was practically a glorified screen saver with some mini games added in like... tic tac toe. But it still managed to be cozy enough that I occasionally pull it up to this day just to check in with the animals and give them pets. This game is absolutely shameless, there is no other way to describe asking $25 for this. The only reason I didn't have a complete conniption is because I got it on sale for $2, and it barely feels worth that. They did everything they could to make it look good enough for a trailer and claim that it has some features, and that's it. And that just, makes me so upset.
And to anyone who may say, but Haze, this is a KIDS game... I would've been absolutely bored of this game after maybe a day of playing it as a kid. Kids deserve quality media too.
I've been experimenting with my coloring style with my pixel art, so I decided to draw fanart of my favorite doomed magical girl Kee ( OC owned by @idolkilling )
I'm so sad that I've changed his colors since this piece because this is SO freaking iconic!! The song that lowkey inspired the entire basis of his character...
The bottom two are my babies <3 Walker is the vampire, Miki is the one in the maids dress. I love how she draws Miki so much especially, he's always so disgruntled and I just wanna eat him whole!!
Had the pleasure of drawing the icon for my favorite bastard man written by my spouse (who's ask blog can be found over at @hottestaugustofthesummer *wink wink nudge nudge*).
