PHOGS! is a wonderful, playful experience in working together as you help a two-headed snaky dog solve some puzzles, laughing while you succeed or fail.
This whole game feels like one big playground filled with interactive toys to tinker with. It’s a colorful land of silly mechanisms, smiling faces, and shining lights that encourages you to be a little bit silly with your friends, working together to see how everything works. Or just to take a few minutes to bark at something. It’s a world that is designed to bring out your playful side, drawing out wonder and curiosity as the pair of you figure out how this silly place works.
The result is a cooperative game where I just felt a lot of happiness with my co-op partner. Maybe a part of me longs for days spent imagining adventures in back yards, finding fun with whatever was on-hand, but this helped me get lost in this mindset, letting the darker realities of my current daily life fade for a little bit. I don’t feel like I want to go back to being a kid again, but that ability to leave my problems behind for a while with a friend is a welcome thing. This world feels like the perfect place for that kind of escape, giving me this brilliant, shining playground to do it.
That it could make me laugh and have a good time even as me and my pal messed up its puzzles made it even better. Sure, you need to solve the puzzles to move on, but these goofy, rubbery dogs/snakes make everything you do so chaotic and absurd that it’s hard not to enjoy yourself no matter what you’re doing.
PHOGS! is a great puzzle game and is filled with many silly moments that come from the natural goofiness that happens when you try to do something with another person. It’s a fantastic little co-op game, but it’s that charming kind of play – a play that comes from becoming an excitable dog – that made for something truly special in 2020.
PHOGS! is available now on the Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Stadia, the publisher’s site, and Steam.
