My Little Puppy

I want to tell you something honest before you decide: this game was built from a real loss. Dreamotion CEO Junyoung Lee adopted Bong-gu, an eight-year-old abandoned Welsh Corgi, and after three years together, the dog crossed the rainbow bridge. My Little Puppy is the studio's attempt to process that grief in public, and you can feel every bit of that personal weight in the way the game is made. That kind of sincerity is rare enough that it earns the game serious attention, even when the mechanics occasionally let it down. The setup puts you in control of Bong-gu himself, seen from a low third-person view behind that famously cropped corgi tail. You are in dog heaven when dad's scent suddenly drifts past, and off you go across a series of hand-crafted biomes, deserts, snowy mountains, beaches, each populated with souls still waiting for their own reunions. The corgi's short legs are a genuine design constraint, not just a cosmetic choice. You cannot jump very far, your hitbox is a little ambiguous, and the snowy mountain section in particular has some slippery physics that can push your patience. Controls are the game's weakest point across the board, and a handful of players have also reported technical bugs like slow-motion glitches and, puzzlingly, an anti-piracy detection false-positive. These are real rough edges worth knowing about. What holds everything together is the structural variety underneath the narrative. The core is light platforming and puzzle-solving built around canine actions: sniffing out scent trails, barking to communicate, cooperating with the dogs and people you meet along the way. But Dreamotion keeps pivoting the genre underneath you, folding in racing segments, rhythm sequences, and a compact fighting section that affectionately parodies Street Fighter, complete with Bong-gu swinging his front legs. The tonal whiplash actually works. The playful moments land harder because the sad ones are so precisely placed. The whole run clocks in at around five to six hours, and some players feel that brevity does not justify the price point. That is a fair argument. But I will say this: the game knows where it is going, and it does not overstay. The visual style earns its Steam Awards nomination for outstanding visual style. Zones are richly colored, the character animation has an obsessive attention to Bong-gu's corgi movement, and the overall aesthetic lands somewhere between a children's picture book and a Studio Ghibli background painting. The soundtrack and atmosphere hold that same careful register, quiet and warm in the open areas, then pulling tight when the story needs to hurt. Grief, pet abandonment, animal experimentation, and bioethics are all present in the narrative, which is worth flagging for anyone currently carrying fresh loss. This is not a purely comforting game. It asks hard questions while it holds your hand. For players who have lost a dog, or who are right now watching a senior pet slow down, My Little Puppy lands in a place most games never reach. The clunky controls and short runtime are genuine criticisms, not things I am waving away. But the craft underneath them, the handmade quality of each zone, the story grounded in a real dog's real life, and the gentle certainty that the ending offers, those are the things I will still think about. Steam's community is sitting at 97 percent positive across over a thousand reviews, and that number feels earned rather than inflated.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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