Sit. Stay. Push that robot onto a conveyor belt and send it straight into an explosive barrel…Good dog.
Dog in the Machine launches today on Steam, putting Studio Chahut’s AutoDog on a mission to escape a dystopian mecha-city and find the humans who were kicked out of it. The problem is that the Machine isn’t especially keen on letting its four-legged resident leave, and there are plenty of robotic guards standing between you and the exit.
Thankfully, this particular dog can learn far more useful tricks than rolling over.
Who’s a Clever AutoDog?
Battles take place on small grids filled with enemies, conveyor belts, buttons, walls, explosive objects, and plenty of opportunities to make one action cause a much bigger problem somewhere else. The trick is working out how everything connects.
Push an enemy into the right place and you may knock something else over. Send a robot onto a conveyor belt and it could end up exactly where you need it. Set off one explosive obstacle and suddenly half the room has joined in. It’s less about hitting the nearest enemy until it falls over and more about setting up the perfect domino effect.
You can check whether your bright idea is actually going to work before committing to it too. The real-time preview system shows how your planned actions will play out, letting you cancel, change things around, and try something else if your carefully arranged robot disaster turns out to be slightly less clever than expected. Very handy when the alternative is learning from your mistakes the painful way.
Teach an Old Dog Some Very New Tricks
Winning a battle earns your AutoDog a new Trick. These act as your attacks, but you’re not limited to simply collecting a bigger pile of them as the run continues. Two Tricks can be combined to create something new, either by following existing blueprints or experimenting with your own combinations. That means your arsenal gradually becomes your own.
A simple move picked up near the start can end up forming part of something far more useful later, and finding combinations that work together becomes just as important as choosing which enemy to shove into the nearest hazard. There are eight different dog breeds to play too, along with procedurally generated levels and permanent upgrades to unlock between runs.
Not Everyone in the City Wants to Bite
There’s more happening between battles than simply picking another route and moving on. You’ll meet a collection of strange characters living inside the city-machine, each offering different ways to expand your Trick Library. New abilities can be bought, traded, looted, upgraded, and sometimes simply stolen, giving you another chance to shape the build before the next fight.
Those encounters also reveal more about the city itself and what happened to the humans your AutoDog is trying to find. The free demo has already given players a good taste of that setup, earning a Very Positive rating with 98% of its 66 Steam reviews recommending it at the time of writing.
The big appeal in Dog in the Machine, is seeing just how much trouble one AutoDog can cause with a few well-chosen Tricks and a room full of objects waiting to be knocked into each other. Most dogs get praised for bringing back a ball, this one gets praised for turning an entire room of killer robots into a chain reaction.