Game Pass Gambols 5: Pupperazzi. Matt Rorie thinks this is a Pac-Man game.

The Game Pass Gambols is my chronicle of attempting to at least sample every game released on Game Pass in 2022.

Game: Pupperazzi

Game Type: Dog photography game

Time Played: Approximately 2 hours.

Completion level: Rolled credits.

Approachability: More or less universal, unless you hate dogs for some reason.

Should You Try It?: Yes. It's short and shallow but almost everyone should get at least half an hour of gentle fun out of it.

Pupperazzi is the kind of game that fits in perfectly on Game Pass. It’s novel, cute enough for anyone to enjoy for a little while, but it’s also shallow and only contains enough content for a couple hours of enjoyment. It’s hard to recommend for $20 but much easier to suggest at the price of “free because you already paid for your subscription.” It’s the kind of game that even non-gamers can appreciate but not one that many people will fall in love with.

So what is Pupperazzi? It’s sort of a mix between Pokemon Snap and Bugsnax with much, much, lower production values than either. You play a sentient walking camera (my favorite moment in the game was discovering just what I was by seeing my shadow) tasked with taking photographs of dogs in a slightly askew version of the modern world. You travel to a total of 5 small areas on an overworld map and can freely explore the 3D environments completing tasks that mostly involve taking photos of the numerous dogs that populate the levels. As you complete tasks you gain followers and “bonks” (the game’s currency) which you can spend on new lenses and film types for your camera and unlock additional abilities like petting dogs to befriend them or taking a selfie (which means that your giant walking camera has a…separate…camera to take pictures of itself, which I kind of love.) This is also how you unlock additional areas and access to areas during different times of day. You can also upload photos to an in-game social media service to get more followers and pick up additional “bonks” lying around the environment, which respawn if you leave and come back. There are items you can pick up in the environment and throw for the dogs to chase (think bones, frisbees, biscuits) and that’s really about it. Your character can double jump pretty high so there’s some very basic platforming involved in getting to certain areas or picking up bonks high in the tree tops but this is a photography game, not a platformer. You spend most of your time searching for the right dogs to take pictures of and then capturing their doggie beauty on film (for some reason this game references film instead of a memory card; even though it has you uploading pictures to social media which doesn’t make any sense at all for a film camera.)

This is the protagonist of Pupperazzi. It's basically perfect.

There’s really not a lot of game here and most of the entertainment factor comes from the weirdness of the world. You get dogs doing human-like things like riding in vehicles or working in food trucks and there are humanoid figures that shamble around and seem to be robotic. It’s not quite as disturbing as Bugsnax with its sentient muppets having their body parts turn into French fries, but it’s just odd enough to be interesting. The environments are low poly but appealing in a way similar to Bugsnax and the dogs themselves are pretty cute though their behaviors are so simple it’s hard to really get attached to them. It’s fun to run around for a little bit and try to find the specific dogs that the challenge system assigns for you but it quickly becomes a little tedious and though most of the areas have 4 times of day with their own challenges and different dogs not enough changes to really make it feel like a different experience. The game seems to know this and rolls credits after you unlock the last area and far before you’ve completed all of the content that it has to offer in terms of completing challenges and buying camera upgrades. It probably took me 90 minutes to get to this credit sequence and I hadn’t actually completed a single achievement. I may go back to this game a little bit to mess around and check off some of the achievements (which tend to be accumulation achievements rather than anything difficult) but I feel like I’ve seen what the game has to offer, which is honestly not that much.

But that not very much is pretty fun to experience for the short while it lasts and with Game Pass you can dip in and out quickly and with no guilt. Laying down $20 for the game you might find yourself irritated at how simple and shallow it is, as well as its jankiness (dogs float in mid air, sometimes the game fails to recognize that there’s a dog in the photo, etc…) but as a free game it’s worth a chuckle or two.

You get assignments from random doggos and other entities, which is more or less the "gameplay" portion of this game. It's just barely enough to be engaging.

Pupperazzi is not a great game. It might not even be a good game, at least by some measures. It’s certainly no Bugsnax, a game that I platinumed and genuinely enjoyed pretty much the whole time, and it has a lot of issues but it does just enough with its weird and cute concept to be worth a little bit of your time. That’s what makes it such a great fit for Game Pass. It’s a simple, entertaining, distraction and a perfect supplement to the much bigger experiences, like Rainbow 6 Extraction and Nobody Saves the World, that Game Pass has been serving up this month. The old way of buying games outright (at retail or online) never quite fit experiences like this, that are in some ways more interactive toys than “games” and Game Pass offers up a way for the creators to profit without customers feeling like they overspent.