"Welcome to Ruff Times. This is your oppawtunity to make it big in the world!"
In Ruff Times, you play as a new dog breeder. Your job is to gather up a bunch of dogs, feed them when their health gets low, take them to the vet when they get sick, and breed them to make even cuter dogs, then sell them. Sounds adorable, right?
Ruff Times is a cute, idle clicker horror indie game by Pop Pop Boat, and is available for windows on itch.io
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This game provides examples of:
- Art-Style Dissonance: The game looks absolutely adorable. The unsubtle dog-breeding culture message is not so adorable.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Level 9 is the ultimate level, and the resulting dog is cute, has big eyesockets, stubby legs, and doesn't get sick or need to be fed! It's a skeleton.
- Crapsaccharine World: In this game with a pastel colors and a fluffy artsyle you breed dogs to make them cuter and cuter until they get slow, sick, start bleeding, and you are eventually left with the 'perfect dog', a skeleton.
- Cruelty Is the Only Option: You will always end up with a skeleton dog at Level 9. (But you can still make it worse by treating your dogs poorly and letting them die.)
- Dem Bones: The 'perfect dog' and end result of your breeding.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: A minor example. The Level 9 dog apparently doesn't need to eat, but they will still eat from food bowls placed in front of them.
- Hurricane of Puns: The dialogue takes every oppawtunity it gets to make a dog-related pun.
- Short-Lived Organism: As you get to the later stages, the game hints at this by saying customers are coming back every week, and later every day, to get new dogs.
- Subverted Kids' Show: It appears as an adorable pet store management game, but it soon becomes clear there's a nasty underbelly to it. The game's itch.io page even advertises that it features "ethical dilemmas".
- Themed Cursor: The cursor is a bone.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: If you take exceptionally poor care of your dogs, they die, and eventually the bodies start to pile up in the trash.
- Wingding Eyes: Dogs that are available for breeding sport hearts when you pick up a compatible dog, and dead dogs have the classic X's.