LONER_DOG://Snuff Puppy Carnage Society

I could tell while I was playing this that I was going to have no idea how to write a review for it. There's so much in this story and it encompasses so many emotions that I feel like I don't have the words to easily sum up how I felt after reading it. There's enough in here to write an entire essay about. I actually had to take breaks while playing it because it was just too tense to play all in one go - I remember when I took one and then loaded it up again an hour later and immediately went "HOW AM I ONLY HALFWAY THROUGH?!" I felt like I had no idea how long it was going to be or how far through I was, which admittedly was a little frustrating, but I think strengthened the themes really well. The good and the bad started to blend together a bit and it felt like watching lives play out rather than reading a story, I had no way of telling what was going to happen next so everything felt like a surprise.

The cycles of better again, worse again, better again, worse again were really intense. It was nerve-wracking watching some people get better while others got worse, or some people get worse while others got better. The whole thing felt like watching someone balance plates and just waiting to see which one fell first. It tied in well with the...puppygirl factory? Which I did keep wanting to see explained but wasn't holding my breath for, since I could tell it was very metaphorical in nature. Where there's a cyclical churn of some sort going on. It really did feel like it highlighted how disposable society tends to view trans people as.

I think my favorite scene was the one where everyone was coming to Audrey for help, it was so nerve-wracking. It was soooooo much to watch her get increasingly drunk as just about everyone she knew started coming to her for advice on stuff.

This review addresses some very major events of the game that you should not spoil yourself on. please play loner dog before reading this, i give it as full of an endorsement as i possibly can.

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This was one of the most painful and beautiful works of art i have ever had the joy of reading. the music, both the cgs and character portarits, the aesthetic of this game is seared into my mind. the dithering is really fucking cool too. but enough about the beauty, on to the pain.

These are some of the most painfully real characters i have ever witnessed. every girl in this story is a real person, i've witnessed the patterns and archetypes of them many times before in my life. i know almost all of these girls without having met them. almost all of them are good people (fuck leah), and yet they continue to hurt each other. you can't blame anyone here for being like this, for being ruined girlthings with destructive habits. yet that only makes seeing things fall apart all the more painful. no one deserves any of this.

On a lighter note about the character writing, its really fucking funny too. i love these idiots so much.

Haley was both one of the most cathartic and wounding characters i have ever encountered. seeing her felt liberating. for so long i had felt like what was wrong with me was a unique failing, it was something i had never witnessed in other people, it felt like the act of exposing the fact i was like this to anyone else would destroy me, would actualise the fear of abandonment. they would revile me for this and be completely justified. getting to witness someone else that was like this changed that. there are so many thoughts i have had that she expressed nearly verbatim.

But god, seeing her was also so agonising. getting to witness her tearing apart her life, be abandoned by the vileness of the world and the apathy of those who claimed to love her, watching her realise her lack of a purpose or drive. all of this felt like watching it happen to me. the version of my self that lived in a worse life, that didn't have someone to love it, would have ended up like this, i can see it so clearly.

Deciding to read this with my wife was a great descision, because i think witnessing haley's suicide alone would have broken me for days. both of us agreed that it felt like watching me die. the same was true for the funeral service and the burial. seeing this happen to her is the strongest deterrant i could ever find for letting myself get worse.

Much like she was swallowed by the sun, this made me way weirder. that game helped begin the process of de-repressing my sexuality, of letting me realise that i am in fact this weird. loner dog sped up that process, make me realise that i am undeniably this much of a freak and i love it.

please never stop making art for fucked up girlthings like us <3

A small friend group of the worst people you’ve ever met goes around enabling the worst things about one another. 

I feel sorry for Haley, Aubrey and Noni, everyone else can rot. 

Which is telling, because 5 minutes into the game I hated Aubrey, but by the end I realized the alcoholic that accidentally shot her dick off is actually the sane one. 

Oh god this really hit close to home. I feel like you really captured a lot of the nuances of being trans and queer on the margins of society. I see a lot of myself in basically all of the characters in the game. At some points it almost felt like I was seeing scenes from my life played out on screen. 

Your writing is fucking excellent. Everybody felt like a real person with their own personality. In a lot of games with a lot of characters I'll start getting people confused, but that just straight up didn't happen here. I also somewhat unconsciously attached people I know irl to these characters, which made certain scenes hit way harder for me. 

I also really liked the way the text boxes are layed out, I don't think I've ever seen that done in a visual novel before, and you execute it masterfully. It definitely helps to have a lot of the text conversations laid out like actual text messages, and I like how you can move everything around to better organize it. 

Also the soundtrack, I love it! Is there anywhere that I could find it online? 

I said this about another one of your games, but I find your work to be aspirationally good. It captures the essence of being a weird druggy puppy and all the trappings that come with that. I look forward to see whatever you and the folks on ur team work on next!!!

waow. masterpiece. im going to live forever btw

There is a vibe this game has that I've really been looking for and only now have found. The vibe in question being a sense of apathy and misery both in the world and characters. While I don't like everything about this game, those dislikes are more of a taste thing and not objective criticism. To me, this story was simply a group of (mostly) friends who get their shitty and mentally I'll existence pounded by life. It seems that Hailey and Maya are the main focus for this story due to the jam it was submitted to, but almost all the other characters are subject to complicated and shitty relationships. And the dynamics and interactions between these individuals are extremely interesting to see.

Something I was really surprised with was how a not small number of characters were each written to be memorable and behave uniquely. If you told me a character's name, I could instantly put a face to it and tell you about their personality and what they did in the story, that is not an easy thing to pull off as a writer. I was also surprised at the comedy this game was able to pull off, especially with Audrey, I think I audibly laughed like 2-3 times during this thing.

Story aside, the game was made really well. I liked the game's style and its art, and if I recall correctly I only caught one spelling mistake. What I didn't like however was the use of things like "LMAO" or keyboard spamming in the voice lines. I don't mind it when characters are texting of course, but when it's in-person dialogue it just felt weird, I suppose this is a preference however.

Great job to everyone involved in this game's creation, and if it's not a problem, I'd love to ask questions about the writing process.

Don't really know how to write comments, but gonna praise this work! it is soooo good. Haven't finished it but I very liked the aesthetics and design choices in this game, also the music! I honestly could sleep listening to some of them, great choices on those! The moveable dialogue boxes is pretty cool too, never seen those done in VNs i played before. The story is super messed up,, and so good,, The characters are awesome,, I LOVE it!! it makes me want to see through your previous games, and the next ones! also don't know how to end this comment. Thank you for reading! and making this game. puppyface :3

Only a few minutes into this and I could already see all the hard work you put into scripting and presentation that you were telling me about before, the different windows and pop-up notifications for different dialogues and narration boxes (which I could move around, super cool), the sprites as little square icons, everything including the sound design fucks very hard, it’s all gives such a vivid image of like… grunginess that I’m already acclimated to with your work, but you keep polishing it with every game, it’s really cool to see.

And of course the art is exceptional as usual, not just the purposefully simple and claustrophobic icons for each character, which show just enough for their personalities to come across, with some really nice backgrounds that had me guessing for a while; part of me thought they were different angles on a clock on each of those backgrounds lol. But still, both those and the CGs were gorgeous and really added to the feel of the VN.

Regarding the cast, they all immediately jump out at you, their personalities are loud and imposing, and with so many of them initially it feels a little hard to tell them apart aside from their portraits, but as I played the game I like that I began to differentiate their very specific brands of mind-rotedness and various neuroses (Haley’s burning anger which at first was hard to differentiate from the rest of the cast but now feels all the more present and tragic in retrospect, Nessa’s seemingly chill but also kind of jealous and vindictive attitude, Audrey’s weird maturity and desire to help despite not giving a shit about her body, etc.) and it’s your writing that really makes that work. Because as a story I definitely feel like you’re initially asking us to hang on a bit, to get to know these fuck-ups before passing quick judgment, kind of like Argo when it first meets them all in pretty much the same way the reader does. I thought that was a really neat way to portray that.

Also a quick aside to point out just how fucking funny this VN is. Like, there were so many out of left field lines and parts worthy of a screenshot, these fucking idiots are so entertaining when they’re not being horribly sad, sometimes both at the same time. “One of my friends shot herself in the dick” nearly made me choke.

And that kinda goes hand in hand with another thing I noticed that feels very real even if normally you’d think it seems unrealistic in writing, that being how when Argo and Nessa (or other combinations of characters) start talking for a while, that outer layer of internet irony and general disregard for everything slowly gives way to more genuine conversations and emotional dialogue, much like how sometimes it works when meeting new people. It’s arresting when it first comes up, to the point it felt a little sudden at first, but I’ve definitely had those types of shifts in conversation too.

I can definitely see the Dennis Cooper inspirations in this. I unfortunately haven’t had the chance to find copies of the George Miles cycle yet, even secondhand, and have only read The Sluts, but this strikes a very similar chord while still being very much your own game, sharply so. It was also really neat to see you tackle a more down to earth story (or as down to earth as all this shit can be) as opposed to your two previous Yuri Jam entries. The fascism and the awfulness of the world is still there of course, but in this one it’s more something the characters have to weather as they try to also weather themselves and each other, than anything they have a chance to strike against. And while the opposite is what I really praised ‘She was Swallowed by the Sun’ for, you really made sure to up the ante on the transgressive queer shit on this one, so I really have nothing to complain about, this was genuinely incredible and sickening in equal measures.

A lot of parts were very difficult to get through, and you can definitely take that as a compliment. Yet they weren’t the more graphic scenes, like all the cutting (which I did have to speed through a little) but the ones with just characters talking, which shows how strong the characterization and writing was for this one. Special shout-out to the absolutely horrible/funny/tragic part where Audrey is just trying to chill and ends up acting as a therapist for her entire friend group and inadvertently speaks to Haley for the last time. Without a doubt my favorite scene in the entire VN, my heart rate was a mess by the end.

Also on the topic of Audrey, I really love her. How is it that this idiot who shot her dick off is the one everybody comes to for advice? And it’s clearly not a new thing, it took me a while to recognize it but Audrey does have a certain… maturity? Emotional common sense? That makes her stand out amongst her friends because she’s the one everyone knows, and she’s the one kind of in the middle of all the drama without really partaking in it, and you can see how exhausting it is, I love it. I was kind of working on a similar character to her, so she quickly became one of my favorites. That, and that out of the entire cast she’s the most like the characters from your previous VNs.

“Nessa can’t remember when she last wanted to see Argo” Ouch. Just a very impactful and to the point line, really loved it.

Speaking of Nessa, I feel like she’s the only one from the group I didn’t get a very good understanding of by the end of the game. Maybe it’s because of her avoidant personality, but as the game progressed I felt kind of like Audrey, wanting her to step away from Argo a little so I could get a scene with her and her inner thoughts, her life and all that. Obviously there’s a bunch of characters already and it’s impossible to give all of them a lot of screentime, but I do wish we’d gotten a little more of Nessa, especially with how in-depth we got to know Argo. 

One thing I wanna mention is that a lot of this game gave me the specific kind of ‘magical realism’ vibe where it’s not actually clear at any point if that’s what the setting is or where the story is going, as opposed to being blatant, which I love a lot, especially with The Hole and all of that. There was definitely a level of detachment at some points simply because of cultural differences in how queer groups are and act like, I think, but that never really got in the way because the characters were so entertaining.

A lot of this game is gonna stay with me for a while, as with your previous works. I feel like I still have to process what happened to these characters… If nothing else, your VNs never fail to inspire me to write and get better in that way, I always feel a bunch of ideas blooming in my head while I read your stuff.

Anyway uhhh this has been pretty rambly and long so far, so a few quick-fire thoughts before I go. For a second I thought Harsh Noise’s glyphs had something to do with SwSBTS? Roaches… I really don’t know how I feel about Roaches, I’ll be pondering on that, I did feel like Audrey toward her in some parts. Love Noni a lot. Fuck Leah. I loved how complex of a character Maya was. Yeah.

Cuppy dog city was not what it was advertised at in those tumblr posts, but I loved it nonetheless.

I just finished reading through this and... wow. It was a lot. Your writing is beautiful. I loved seeing the narration just tell me what all the different characters were doing at that given time... and I loved the focus on many different characters, seeing their lives intertwine in interesting ways. I also want to shout out the scene where Argo and Nessa do acid together. That was beautiful; not just the way you wrote it, but also the sort of visual overlay you put over the scene for the fractals and stuff. There's so much going on in this one, I don't know what else to say other than amazing work. I feel hollowed out by it all (positive).

The characters felt like they have lived, not in a physical sense but that they have thoroughly had their own unique sets of perspective and experiences, that they have all come together and have been severely fucked and trying to do the best they simply can.

No one character in this story is underdeveloped. Everyone has a distinct personality, flaws, and characteristics. I especially loved the portraits for every character, which gives them so much life.

The pure, raw, unadulterated emotions radiating through the text kept me yearning for each next line. I read this all in one go, and I cannot count the times I was awestruck by the characters and story

An excellent VN. Horribly amazing. Emotionally Charged. God. I wish I could read this again. I want to read this again. 

This is one of the best visual novels I've ever read. The CGs are so good and every character feels like a real person I know and wish I didn't.

I just wanted to say that this has been the best thing I've read all year and it's so wonderful and fantastic and it just spoke to me in a way that many thing haven't. I love it and it's one of my favorite VNs of all time, I'm gonna go and read everything this author has ever made now :3

idk where to begin with this other than to say that this is my favorite piece of art ive experienced this year

finished it in one sitting and then thought abt it for a few hours and went to bed, i then woke up n almost immediatly burst into tears cos i was thinking abt everything in this game n how beautiful, sad and overwhelming it all is.

i can't overstate how close to home this all hit for me, every character feels like a different part of me or someone ive known, the entire game made me feel so uncomfortably seen and understood for who i am and the way my brain works in a way very few things have. 

love as violence and violence as love

i hope this is somewhat comprihensible im kinda just rambling cos this affected me a lot, thank you so much for making art like this its so special <3

also seeing it/its protags makes me so happy n seen :'3

the first VN i played for this jam and im glad it was. it’s brutal, honest, stylish, personal, and about as intense as the name suggests. after reading this, i realize that it makes sense that the snuff girlies have an insightful and touching understanding of death, and, by proxy, life. will definitely be revisiting this dev (after some time to recover, bc. woof!)

A really wonderful experience that played to the strengths of the creators. Messy, brutal, overwhelming and mundane feelings. i was very impressed with how cohesive everything felt, and how engaging the writing was. thank you for sharing.

Is there hope for an Android version? I would really love to play this as it looks to be right up my alley

jesus fucking christ this is so good. It's definitely one of those if-you-get-it-you-get-it games for sure. I really appreciate so much of it. It feels like a shattered mirror of a game to me, and though some of the pieces aren't necessarily pointed at me, the ones that are reflect with crystal clarity. The writing is really good, it did such an amazing job of weaving together multiple scenes happening simultaneously in a way that didn't feel confusing at all, everything just flowed so well together.

The sheer pain, misery, anguish of the girls and dogs living not just in hell but in a decaying corpse of a world is so potent. To me, Snek is best at portraying these dead, rotting worlds following girls and its whose freakish nature puts them in the funnel of reality's meat grinder, desperately trying to claw their way out and bring as many others with them as they can. Loner Dog feels almost like the logical endpoint of that concept, a definite peak in it's portrayal of this from the few of it's games I've played. It's violently hopeless to me, a constant assertion of the impossibility of a meaning besides to help your fellow sister and try to enjoy the little of life you can squeeze into the margins you've been shoved into; "you deserve a tomorrow worth knowing" is a chapter title that really really stuck with me for sure. The little bits of hope or kindness in the game are fought for tooth and nail, the characters have to go far out of their way for it almost always, and when not it's often just a bandaid on the bullet hole, something to try and ease the pre-existing overwhelming pain of their situation. A few of the situations were uncannily realistic, written in a way that shows a real familiarity and understanding of them, the fucked-up-ness of it. "The world is not a gentle place" is another chapter title that stood out to me; not only is it not a gentle place, it is actively cruel and antagonistic towards the happiness and existence of these characters, as reality often feels to myself and many others like me.

As for characters, I really really like all of them honestly. All of them feel like people I've either been or met, and they feel so raw and real, freaks like those I know and love, if not a bit more intense. The intensity serves the aesthetic and feeling of the story quite well though. Haley's story is especially tragic as I'm sure anyone who's played it would agree, but it's a familiar tragedy. All too familiar, a zing from moving in a direction my deeper scars make difficult from nerve damage, if that makes sense. Harsh Noise might be my favorite character because of just how checked out they are the whole time, they're really cool I think even though they're kind of just on the sidelines the whole time save for a couple scenes. Their tats are so cool, also I have an affinity for using "Noise" as a name because of things in my own life, so I just kind of immediately thought they were cool.

This game was genuinely so crazy I'm still thinking through everything. The character portraits and backgrounds are so good and evocative, the characters are all so great and horrible and fucked up. It brought up a lot of memories and emotions about trans community, I full cried like, 3 times. It also really makes me want to try making something myself again, truly a really exceptional piece of art. It's the first game of yours I've played (via going through game jam submissions) and I need to now check out the others. 

I'm still processing it but goddamn that was an amazing vn, was just gonna read a little bit of it but ended up not being able to put it down and read it all in one go. this is def gonna be stuck in my brain for the next few weeks

Honestly like, HOLY FUCK!!! I very rarely play things with such intense CWs (and I very nearly didn't finish the game because of them) but I'm very glad I did. What an unabashed exploration into sexuality, grief, and queerness. The things these characters did made me sick, but the context in which these characters were forced to endure and try to survive in made it all make sense. I don't know if I "understood it" exactly as you intended and there's always the chance that it was just a fun way to explore some more fucked up kinks (and even then, more power to you!) but I do think that there is IMMENSE value in the story being told. How people endure in such a fucked up and downright fucking EVIL society (the hole, holy fuck.) would be equally as fucked up, and it's not hard to see the parallels to what Trans and Queer people have to endure day-to-day. What a story, fuck.

came across this randomly late last night during a pretty heavy depressive episode, didn't expect to find such a beautiful piece of media. it comforted me significantly and will most likely stick with me as a comfort piece. the music helped drown out the bad thoughts, discovered a new coping mechanism and im not against it. even the day after the game and its writing is still painted into my brain magically and hauntingly wonderful 

without spoilers i can relate to a good chunk of the characters and their more emotional moments,'specially haley with recent events in my life. (as well as the large possibility that i am undiagnosed bpd)

anyways, very glad i stumbled across this little corner of the internet, thank you for your hard work and dedication to making this <3

Jesus fuck, another amazing work of art by you.  It took me a little bit to get invested but this is right behind "She Was Swallowed By The Sun" for me. Went on for way longer than I expected (not a bad thing).

Welp. I feel like my heart has been hollowed out with a fucking melon baller. Playing this felt like encountering something bigger than it should be, like a hidden timeless classic or an eldritch god or something- that probably doesn’t make sense. This is operating on frequencies so far above me I can’t parse them but I can still feel the reverberations.

I need to take a shower and lie in the dark for a week lol. This will be on my mind for a while. You’ve made something special. I hope you all are okay.