Dog in the Machine is a turn-based roguelite that heavily rewards creative attack chains while placing little to no pressure on players with its built-in rewind mechanic. It’s a fascinating juxtaposition of tactical gameplay and a very enticing (and entirely free) “try again” button that makes it so satisfying to play.
I’ve been playing it in my free time, and it’s a very relaxing game that gives you plenty of chances to get some dopamine-inducing moments. Here are my thoughts on it!
NOTE: I’ve been given a review copy of the game and these are my initial thoughts after playing through it for several hours.
Try Until You Succeed
The game has you playing an “autoDog” in a dystopian setting where bots have taken over. There’s a surprising amount of worldbuilding and an actual story revolving around a human resistance, but I’ll mainly be focusing on the gameplay for this one.
It’s a fairly simple turn-based tactical game where you mainly only control a single unit. To compensate for the lack of reinforcements, you have to use the environment around you and trigger chain reactions to deal damage to enemies that your attacks can’t reach.
The combat’s complexity comes in how you tackle each encounter and pick which nodes to go through, because simply attacking stuff isn’t going to get you very far most of the time. Luckily, you can essentially redo the entire turn until you actually end it.
Each individual move can be canceled as long as you don’t end the turn. Pushed an enemy forward and didn’t like the outcome? Rewind and try a different approach! There’s even a draft system that lets you plan out the same turn multiple ways, so you can easily attempt multiple combos before committing to what you would consider the “perfect turn”.
Alarm Management & Map Traversal
The map in this game is similar to stuff like FTL or One Step From Eden, where you have randomized branching paths to choose from after each encounter. It ties in well with the game’s “Alarm” system, which is a bar on the top part of the screen that you have to maintain at a low number.
Every now and then, your enemies will try to raise the alarm level, and you can reduce this by dealing damage to them. If your alarm bar fills up, the run abruptly ends. It’s something you have to manage all throughout a run, and it’ll force you into making unconventional plays just to keep it at a manageable level.
Even with the free rewinds, it’s easy to run into unwinnable situations if you forget to keep your alarm level low. It’s how I lost my very first run, as I had completely neglected it by the time I reached my second boss fight. The game even warns you that it’s wraps if you try to end a turn while there’s a lethal number of alarms being raised, which just made me go “Ohhh” before gracefully accepting my fate.
This system rears its head in the map as well, as there are map nodes that can give you varying rewards in exchange for raising the current alarm level. They can give you some valuable resources that can help you upgrade your moves and make the run so much easier, but you’ll need to decide whether or not it’s worth the risk of a potential early end.
Long-Term Fun
Each run of Dog in the Machine quickly turns into a puzzle game where you come up with ways to beat the current level as efficiently as possible. By the time you reach even just the first boss room, you’re likely already devising chain reactions that can get you through the level in just a handful of turns.
Even with its relatively small set of meta-progression upgrades (or at least based on my experience so far, as I didn’t get to play far enough to unlock whatever “Nexus Nodes” are), the game still has a lot of staying power with all the randomness and solving that you’ll be doing throughout every run. If you love taking your time drafting up ways to obliterate everything on the screen in one go, you’ll get so much mileage out of this affordable gem.
It’s a worthy addition to one’s roguelite library, and as someone who loves playing a wide range of games in the genre, Dog in the Machine is a breath of fresh air from all the fast-paced bullet heavens that I’ve been diving into lately.