PHOGS! is certainly a strange game, with its world and characters lifted straight from a colourful fever dream, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t one of the best games of 2020. A co-op adventure for the ages, PHOGS! brought a level of wholesome adventuring to a year that we’re all thankful is finally over. I’m not saying 2021 is going to be much better, but if we can make it through one year, we can handle the next one.
Playing as a two-headed dog with a stretchy belly, you explore a variety of worlds based on the themes of Food, Play and Sleep. While PHOGS! can be played as a single-player game, it’s primarily designed as a couch co-op title, but Bit Loom Games wisely included online co-op play and brought PHOGS! to Xbox Game Pass, ensuring that everyone was given ample opportunity to recruit someone else to join them on this uplifting odyssey.
If you’re looking for more story in your co-op adventure, you’d be better off playing a game like A Way Out, but PHOGS! isn’t about telling a hard hitting narrative with action and betrayal around every corner. The beauty of the tale that PHOGS! tells you is in the sights and sounds you encounter, the puzzles that you’ll be solving and the friends you make along the way. Nothing will warm your heart faster than stopping to get strokes from the friendly NPCs that litter the various levels.
Locking the worlds into key themes such as Food, Play and Sleep sounds like a recipe for the level design to become stagnant, but it’s a credit to Bit Loom’s talent that they’ve been able to create a game that’s so varied and engaging throughout its 10 hour run-time. This is especially true when you consider that PHOGS! is their first project as a developer.
Visually, the worlds of PHOGS! take their themes in a number of interesting directions. The Food levels run the gamut of countryside farming to a giant octopus making some soup in a bowl the size of Lake Windermere, while the Play levels include lazy days at the beach and a trip to the arcade. Even the Sleep levels, which aren’t as visually varied as the other worlds, still feature some memorable areas and characters, including the only cute video game spider in existence.
It’s the gameplay that allows the levels to really showcase their inventiveness. As a physics based game, you’ll be doing plenty of pushing and pulling objects to navigate the environment. However, you’ll also find the time to stage a heist of a heavily guarded castle, recreating those infuriating claw machine games that are the bane of any Yakuza player (aside from any side mission involving Shogi), and even create the topping to your own pizza. For a physics game involving two players who are literally joined at the hip, there’s a surprising amount of gameplay ideas to enjoy.
Again, PHOGS! really comes into its own once you’ve found that second player to share the joy of discovery with, but when you have the Garfunkel to your Simon (or vice versa if you prefer), there are few co-op games more enjoyable. Red and Blue, the two dog heads you control, are just the best good boys in gaming, and they deserve a loving home.
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