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I honestly wish I could recommend this game to people. It's very cute and is a decent management sim at its core, and the fact you can switch character models at any time is very nice. Lots of dogs to choose for your companion dog is also fun, and you can switch that out at any time too. The way it rolls out skill points and events is fine, and the skills seem fairly useful with some being some difficult choices of one over the other.

However, unfortunately I think it's biggest sin is that it gets boring real fast. The gameplay loop is the same day in and out, and the story is barely there at all. And while managing it and all the dogs by yourself can be overwhelming, I had so much money for most of the game and I hired some helpers and the only overwhelming thing for most of the game after that point was trying to beat the helpers to the holding pen so I could put the dog(s) into kennels before they got a bath. The foster network was a neat idea, but ultimately I used it like twice and had filled up all eight pages with foster homes.

A smaller nitpick in the vein of it being boring, there isn't really a lot of variety in dogs in the shelter. At one point, someone asked for a lost dog that was an exotic puppy and I had brought them five dogs before finding the right one because they were literally all the same look and everything and had like two different puppy litter drop offs of the same dog type within like 3 days. And while there is a skill to increase the likelyhood of dogs gaining positive traits, I kinda wish there was more to that overall outside of getting lucky and getting a random event to train some bad traits out of random dogs. Also, the special npcs look the same as regular adopters, and on days they both show up it was a guessing game to remember which was which in the time it takes to go look at dogs to show for adoption.

There's also a sort of frustration to the building mode being very bare bones, and the fact you have to destroy, checkout, and then rebuild it to move a room is very annoying. Often I would be trying to set up the play space and because I didn't line it up with the door properly so it was partly blocked, and simply moving it would have been an easier option than destroying it, rebuilding it, and hoping it wasn't put into a similar position. As others have said, I wish there was like the ability to actually rearrange the shelter rooms that are built. You can buy up to ten plots, but I never bought more than two, and it didn't feel like I needed more than that. The dogs were either very frequent with no visitors or no dogs with frequent visitors, so I always had space for more with what I had.

I wouldn't have minded the bugs if they both weren't so incredibly frequent (and often disruptive), and that the only option to report these bugs is a link to join the community discord. Why should I have to join a discord just to report bugs? That just seems counter-intuitive to actually collecting and fixing bugs in my opinion. The bugs that also almost always needed me to reload (one such as all my helpers didn't show up for multiple days despite being in the staff management screen) made me decide whether it was worth it to restart that day from scratch or wait until the next day for the saving function to kick in so as to not to lose any progress on dogs getting adopted. My biggest bug (that I quit the save just to try to send a report for because I hadn't seen anyone talking about) was that my grants, which were already completed, would refuse to roll over/complete and did not let me choose any other grants from week to week. Reloading the save and quitting and opening the game again did not fix this. It literally only fixed itself on the very last week of story mode.

Overall, very sad I don't think I can recommend this to other people. It's cute overall, but the story mode is bare bones and doesn't really connect you with the end scene due to the mechanics and nature of the game, and most of the time once I had the money I pretty much automated everything and found myself with not much to do. This game is full of frequent bugs that cause you to reload the save/game, and with no manual quick save function losing progress was always guaranteed. I got this with a small bundle that was offered alongside a few other games, and I don't think this is really worth getting it at full price if you're really keen on playing this.