About This Game Sun Dogs is about exploring our inner solar system, altering your body, and embracing death. In a future where humanity alters itself without a second thought, you must do the same. Skim along the Sun's corona, float in the Venusian clouds, travel the Martian plains.When your body dies, your mind will be given a new one, and you will keep going.FeaturingExpansive and unique science fiction, across planets, moons, and space stationsDynamic text reacts to your character and actions Full modding system allowing additions or rewrites to the entire game 7aa9394dea Title: Sun DogsGenre: Adventure, Casual, IndieDeveloper:Royal PolygonPublisher:Royal PolygonRelease Date: 29 Oct, 2015 Sun Dogs Torrent 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 constructs. I found the locations to be quite striking, though this is all conveyed through text. The actual graphics elements in the game are extremely minimialistic. I don't consider this a drawback, although its clearly not for everyone. To me, the game is like reading a short story set in a distant, post-human solar system. I quite enjoyed it.I do wish they had gone a bit farther, though, and expanded the gameplay elements. In the course of a playthrough one can gather items and skills. If you are killed you lose the latter, but retain the knowledge. These different skills and items do seem to effect what happens at different locations, but their utility is opaque. A second issue I had is that while certain actions are risky, the risk is not something that the player can control. Bad things just happen, a space pod is lasered by pirates, or a train explodes, and then you are back where you did your previous upload. When on a mission - and there are a few - the only way to mitigate potential troubles is to simply fly to a location and not explore it, yet that exploration is where the game excels. Finally, I am not sure if there is an endgame. Perhaps I simply didn't reach it in my two play throughs. I was sort of expecting other locations to open up, and yet... there seems to be no final destination.On a positive side, the game can be modified. I have not tried this myself, but the text and branches can (as far as I can tell) be easily altered. I am unsure if one can add new locations.I do like this game, and I do recommoned it to anyone who enjoys reading hard science fiction. I do wish they had allowed for greater player agency.. 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 and language, and little details in the story text that bring it to life. In fact, the minimalism of the game works in its favor - your brain is the graphics card and rendering engine.The problem with Sun Dogs is that it's largely a case of go somewhere, have events happen, hope you have the right tool\/skill to survive or change things, and go on. Your character has very little initiative, you just wait until things happen, including events that one would think is intentional (why can't I go look for cybernetic mods I used to have). This lack of control and randomness ultimately make the game hard to enjoy as games often end up as a case of clicking-and-hoping.Thus the core flaw of Sun Dogs is not the idea, the story, the graphics, but the choice of mechanics.If the developer is reading this, I truly applaud their hard work and brilliant writing. I think the game would be best with more choice and less randomness, perhaps with a "dictionary" that helps the character make choices as they uncover them.Though I do not reccomend this game, I, strangely, do not regret purchasing it - I took a chance and supported a good idea. I felt the implementation ultimately didn't work.I also want to note the developer is supportive on the forums, so though I critique the game, I applaud his dedication to his art and his engagement with people on the game.. 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'; you travel around, exploring and finding new events and flavor text which are given mostly at random, then using those things you have obtained to find more events and flavor text which are also given mostly at random. It is, perhaps, the simplest and most base form of something I would just barely consider a roguelike, but even that title may be giving it too much credit on the gameplay front. The writing is solid, and the setting itself is fairly unique and interesting to learn about. As far as science fiction goes, it's nothing groundbreaking; but there's enough that, for someone who enjoys text-based games primarily based around exposition and also enjoys a solid science fiction piece, it may be worth the cost. The music is somber, if repetitive, since it never changes. It somewhat reminds me of STALKER's main menu theme and the general ambient mood of that game's music. After about five minutes you may feel the need to set up your own soundtrack. There was a hotfix. Will reassess. edit: Music seems fine now that there's some variety, no complaints. Of note, and of interest to myself especially as a writer, are the expansive mod tools. Since the game itself is so simple, it can essentially be rewritten from the ground up, which is a great feature. Am I myself terribly interested in what is in the game now? No, not really- but I am extremely interested in trying my own hand at making something similar. Overall, I recommend it for those interested in this sort of non-game which is primarily based around exposition and setting building. Though I feel I have seen everything gameplay wise the game has to offer even with less than an hour ingame per writing this review, I am still interested to see the extent of the skill system and what I can trigger by discovering different things to learn more about the setting, which is the core of the game. By no means should one expect this game to be something like Elite.. 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.. Creative game with a Good name. 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.
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Sun Dogs Torrent
Updated: Mar 14, 2020
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