A hound is an endless font of unconditional love and they frequently if inadvertently perform the important job of keeping their owner(s) sane in an increasingly insane world. But when your human is suffering the unbearable weight that comes from the soul-crushing travails of adulthood, of mounting regrets and failures, of desires unrequited and dreams out of reach and bad news around every corner, how is a simple dog meant to grapple with any of that? Medallion Games's Grapple Dog, which has nothing to do with any of the above, is about a dog called Pedro who has a grappling hook (its name presently unknown). You use it to fling yourself around a 2D platformer world to make progress or to acquire remote collectibles, along with a standard jump, a wall-jump, and a ground pound move that all find frequent application as you traverse these mostly linear stages. It's a pretty lighthearted game all things considered, but one that promises some deeper (and more challenging) waters in its later reaches.

The story's some nonsense or other about a famous inventor who went missing thousands of years ago, and in the present Pedro awakens one of the Inventor's last creations—an embittered robot engineer named Nul, who quickly declares war on the world with his own synthetic army as he seeks the same "cosmic" inventions the protagonists have been researching—and is forced to use his newly acquired grapple hook and deep reserves of moxie to cut Nul off at the pass. Levels typically flow from checkpoint to checkpoint, with five large purple gem collectibles hidden throughout (they do the thing where they light up in sequential order, so you have some vague idea of where to check if there's one missing) and a much larger number of smaller fruit-like collectibles that equal one or two more purple gems when aggregated. The reason you need these things is to open the way to the boss level of the current world, though of course if you're the collectathon type they're pretty much the main goal. You can also find and unlock timer-based bonus stages which offer a few more purple gems if you're a little short. Finally, for the more daring/patient, there's a time trial mode that unlocks after completing a level once: this removes all the collectibles so you can maintain focus on moving through the level topography as quickly as possible.

The level design is bouncy and flows well for the most part, as it probably should if the developers felt the need to bolt on a time trial mode, though it can occasionally get a bit obnoxious too. It loves the trick where you find yourself launched through a one-way door and then immediate hit the next checkpoint, so if there was some alternative route in the previous room that almost certainly led to a dead end with a gem you needed to get for whatever OCD brain goblins that are between you and your therapist to hash out, you've no choice but to either start the level over then and there (yay) or keep going to the end and play through the whole thing again to grab it (yaaay): this isn't the type of game where you're allowed to just bail from a level you've already done once you've found the one gem you were missing. But hey, I get it; if I were still a game designer I'd find ways to make the players' life miserable too. Those ingrates always do things like gripe about bugs or write scathing reviews, so it is nice to scorn them occasionally.

The grappling has an intuitive nuance to it that you learn more about as you play, but it's almost all stuff you have to discover on your own (or be told about): if you jump out while at the lowest point of the swing you'll move very quickly in a horizontal direction and likewise will be able to get some pretty decent height if you jump out of the grapple right at the apex of the swing. You can of course immediately grapple and swing again and this is key for quickly getting over larger pits or spike rooms. Some green objects can give you extra air if you bounce off them with the mid-air ground-pound but I found these things to be incredibly capricious: I'd often be launched backwards or at a reduced momentum that made it impossible to reach the next object in the sequence. It's doing the whole precision platformer thing beyond a certain point—one of those types that appear to offer a relatively light time early on but gets ever more devious and demanding the further in you get—and I'm getting kinda antsy about the kind of horrors it has in store, if those annoying ground-pound hoppers are any indication. At least so far the grappling part hasn't let me down; it's mostly the parts in-between.

The game's highlight is its presentation, though. I couldn't name the very specific type of early '90s soundtrack it's going for beyond being a combination of new jack swing (because swinging is something you do a lot) (physically, I mean) and that heavily-sampled type of hip-hop that was taking off around that time, but it's the sort of music that you would typically hear in a Sonic Team game or maybe Silicon & Synapse's The Lost Vikings. Much like listening to the pleasant DnB in Bomberman Hero, which I played semi-recently, it was a nice nostalgic reminder of a bygone era of music and it certainly helps Grapple Dog stand out from its Indie 2D platformer contemporaries while also creating a temporal link to its late-20th century 2D grappling inspirations like Umihara Kawase, Super Metroid, or Bionic Commando. Visually it has a simple pixel look with strong color saturation and heavy borders around everything: it reminds me most of Mr. Driller of course, but there's also the recent Part Time UFO too (another grapple-centric game). Its presentation, and the playful sense of humor projected by its script as you talk to NPCs for gameplay hints, is what's luring me into this false sense of security that it's not going to get all punishingly exact on me but even though I'm only at the end of the second world (of six, I believe) there's indications that it's going to be the kind of game I'll be beating my head against as I repeat several diabolical stretches of platforming over and over. Well, that charming pessimism of mine is largely why I end many of these reviews with "so far".

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Post-Playthrough Edit: As I sadly predicted, the game ran into a downfall that affects many precision platforming games of its type: what were adequate mechanics for the start of the game were woefully insufficient for when the chips were down and you were required to jump and swing through any number of strictly-timed and obstacle-laden gauntlets. The indicator that determined where your grapple was aimed was unreliable at best, often vanishing at inopportune times or else seemingly ineffective as your hook passed through grapple-ready material and enemies alike. Enemy hitboxes were frequently enigmatic in nature, and enemies close to walls would damage you because after jumping towards them you'd immediately start wall-sliding which made you vulnerable. Finally, the last course in the game glitched out and removed half its collectibles, forcing me to start it over. Truly, the heart is there and the aesthetic is wonderful, but if Umihara Kawase couldn't figure out how to avoid frustration-free grappling then a tiny Indie like this with a mean streak a mile wide has no chance.