Heir of the Dog review

Despite being in something of an Adventure Game renaissance right now, there aren’t too many that follow the classic formula. All of them have you using items on other items or navigating dialogue trees, but almost none use the traditional Verb system popularized by the likes of Maniac Mansion and Secret of Monkey Island. Heir of the Dog takes some very direct inspiration from those titles, and feels like a short Newgrounds game from the early 2000s got expanded into a full 10 hour adventure. It’s weird and a little abrasive, but with some clever puzzles, likeable characters, and a dry British wit it’ll win you over. 

You are Cummerbund Bandersnatch, and your uncle has been kidnapped. Well, more specifically dog-napped, as he’s inadvertently created a formula that turns people into dogs. And Cummerbund just drank it himself, so every day from 8 PM to 8 AM Bandersnatch will ditch his plum peacoat for a brown fur coat. The top hat stays on at all times, however, because that’s where he keeps all his items. 

As his form changes, so do his verbs: as a human, he can look, pick up, speak, and use, while as a dog he can look, pick up, sniff, and use. Most of those overlap, which can make the transformation feel less like the game’s main hook and more like a non-committal gimmick, but there are enough differences that help the forms feel distinct enough. For example, Bandersnatch will be able to go certain places as a dog he can’t as a human, or pick up certain objects he can’t as a dog. 

Even so, the vast majority of your time in Heir of the Dog will be spent as a human, which does feel like something of a missed opportunity to set the game apart. Of course, a dog would be more limited in what conversations and inventory/object puzzles they could accomplish, and that’s mostly what you’ll be doing here as you wander around London looking for Bandersnatch’s uncle. The game world slowly opens up as you play, with more areas to explore, more Brits to gab with, and more items to stuff in your top hat. You start off with just the street around Bandersnatch’s uncle’s house available, so the game opens up pretty massively every few hours. 

The puzzles don’t exactly use the Moon Logic the genre is infamous for, but I did find myself getting stuck pretty frequently. These moments generally came in two flavors: knowing what I needed to do but not knowing how the game wanted me to do it, or not knowing what I needed to do and running around like a headless chicken. Both of those might sound frustrating, and while they definitely were sometimes, more frequently it just made finally figuring out the puzzle more satisfying. 

As an example of enjoying the puzzling, there’s a puzzle later on in the game where you need to find the correct sequence of animals to say as a password to get into a tug-o-eel competition. The password changes daily, but there’s a poster hinting at the sequence and a series of statues on the beach. The poster looks like a weird grid of symbols at first, but compare it to your surroundings and suddenly what it’s trying to tell you will click into place. Moments like that are fantastic, and personally the highlight of the game for me was navigating to Eastern London over a Pea Souper using a hot air balloon. You can’t actually steer, so you need to follow three maps of wind currents at different altitudes to get where you want to go.

Less enjoyable puzzles come about when you need to use a specific verb on an object you really wouldn’t think to or when you need to pixel hunt. The most frustrating of the former was right at the end of the game, when you need to use some jail bars to take them off the window. There’s no dialogue to hint that you need to do this with the Look command, so it really is just a matter of using everything on everything else. Much like pixel hunting to find all the crates you need to make a small staircase for another puzzle. 

There are also puzzles which will basically force you to take notes. I have mixed feelings about these. On one hand, I love having to actually take notes in a game! It really makes you think about whatever puzzle you're trying to solve and all the information you need. On the other hand, you don’t often know exactly what you need to notate here. There’s a puzzle where you need to answer a quiz about various breeds of dogs to get a mop, and despite taking notes on all the posters containing the information around town, I still had to revisit them for basically every question as I hadn’t written down or extrapolated a specific bit. I ended up just taking screenshots of all the posters for reference, but it was still frustrating. 

The worst puzzle in the game, however, involves… MATH. You’re asked to convert several nonsense measurements into other nonsense measurements. I simply could not wrap my head around this one, and ended up just guessing. Math puzzles can work (even if I’d rather not do math), but the decimals in particular just stumped me and felt overwhelming.

Thankfully there’s at least one thing driving you forward for the entire game: the humor. It’s never exactly laugh out loud and starts out a bit rough, but once the game gets into a groove the writing becomes razor sharp. The jokes just keep stacking on top of each other in a hilarious tower of context; I particularly loved the setup and payoff to Ragamuffin Idol and everything to do with the urchins. There’s a lot of visual humor too, like a sign that says “Child Labour Available Upon Request”.

I’m not the biggest fan of this particular visual style—the game looks a lot like Thimbleweed Park—but I do appreciate the craftsmanship in the pixel art. There’s tons and tons of detail in the environment, with dithering to add texture or shadows, and you can tell a lot of love went into all the UI animations, like how Cummerbund’s eyes shift around when Look is selected. It’s more a matter of taste than anything to do with the actual quality. 

Heir of the Dog starts off a bit rough and has frustrating points sprinkled throughout, but it’s a great throwback to the classics while also making its own mark. It’s a fun romp through 1859 London with great humor, fun puzzles, and a story that has some surprising twists and turns.