Haunted Paws

My instinct with any game billing itself as 'cozy horror' is mild suspicion - the genre label has been stretched thin enough to snap. Haunted Paws earns it, though, and the reason starts with the premise's specific absurdity: you are small dogs, your journalist human has been kidnapped and taken to a haunted mansion, and you are going in after her. That setup, played totally straight by a studio of two people based in Kaunas, Lithuania, turns out to be exactly the right container for the tonal mix the game is reaching for. The mechanical heart of Haunted Paws is co-op puzzle solving, and the puzzles are built around the fact that you are, specifically, dogs. You sniff out scent trails to follow your owner's path through the mansion. You dig for buried keys and clues. You carry items in your mouth - axes, books, flashlights, food - and combine efforts with your partner to work mechanisms neither pup could manage alone. The car-driving sequence, where one dog handles the wheel and the other works the pedals, is a neat example of how the game stretches that two-body logic. Stealth matters too: unlike most action-adventure titles, these puppies cannot reliably fight their way through anything. Running and hiding inside boxes and washing machines is a legitimate strategy, not a failure state. The enemy roster has personality. Skeletons wander the grounds doing household chores - tending gardens, cooking, cleaning - and stay indifferent to you as long as you leave their routines undisturbed. Other creatures, like the cat who transforms into a murder of crows or the owlman boss who opens the demo chapter, carry actual backstories. Defeating them uncovers those stories and sets them free, which is a small but meaningful narrative wrinkle. An NPC skeleton named Wizbone exists as a friendly contact. The village is called Barkville. The game knows exactly what it is. Customization is deep for a title at this scale. You choose your breed from options including bull terriers, huskies, schnauzers, Basenjis, and pugs. Fur pattern, tail shape, and eye color are all adjustable, and hats - witch, wizard, unicorn, chef, and more - unlock progressively by solving puzzles or helping NPCs. After the Halloween playtest closed, the team took community feedback seriously and undertook a full graphical overhaul, reworking scene detail levels and redesigning enemy models for more atmosphere and personality. The full game is planned across four chapters, each with distinct levels, enemies, and bosses. At the time of writing the game has not yet released, so take what follows as pre-release signal rather than finished verdict: everything in the playtest and development updates points to a studio that is listening and iterating carefully. The wishlist numbers suggest a lot of people are watching. Accessibility options including colorblind modes and adjustable text sizes are confirmed for launch. The honest caveat is that Haunted Paws is designed as a two-player experience first. A solo mode exists with an AI companion controlling the second pup, but every mechanical and tonal beat in what has been shown reads better with another person present, ideally on a couch or via online co-op. If you have nobody to play with, the AI fallback is there, but this is fundamentally a game about doing small brave things alongside someone else.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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