Developer: Beautifun Games
Publisher: Beautifun Games
Platforms: PC, Switch
Tested on: Switch
Professor Lupo and his horrible pets – Review
Professor Lupo and his horrible pets is a top-down puzzle game developed by Beautifun games. You get to play as an intern whose job has always been to take care of the creatures professor Lupo brought back from his many adventures. But are these creatures still easy to take care of now that they have broken free from their restraints? Can you make it out alive out of the Aurora space station?
Story
Professor Lupo is your average mad scientist who has traveled to almost every galaxy within reach to collect some of the most horrendous aliens. He recently has returned to the proximity of the Earth with his space ship to sell those alien monsters to the highest bidder amongst the current warlords who are responsible for dividing the earth. The game starts off with a cutscene where professor Lupo introduces himself and his cause. He wants to sell these creatures for a fair amount of money. So what’s better than to showcase them and reveal what those aliens are capable of.
Here’s where you appear as the most epic intern of all time and obviously, you are not on time. Your job on the Aurora Space station has always been to take care and study these vile creatures so there wasn’t a better candidate to carry out the showcase really. When you finally arrive on the scene you start to show what those creatures are capable of. Unfortunately for you, that is the exact same time the Aurora space ship falls under attack. To make it even better, the damage causes the aliens to escape and run loose inside the space ship. So a new task on your to-do list is finding a way to escape and not becoming the dinner of your beloved ‘little’ pets.
Graphics
The art style of the game is fun to look at and makes it overall entertaining. The monsters are just adorable. Yes, we know that they should look foul and vicious but they are not and that brings a certain charm to Professor Lupo and his horrible pets. The cutscenes are well animated and you find yourself right inside of a cartoon world. The aesthetics of the game are a bit like old-school flash games, but with a lot of details and well-finished visuals.
Sound
Soundwise Professor Lupo and his horrible pets has all it needs for a smaller game. It’s fully voice-acted which gives more depth to the jokes they crack every two seconds and to the personalities of the characters that are displayed. Sadly, many jokes don’t hit their target, which makes them a bit annoying and cheesy at times. Also, all sounds you hear, as background noise, make the game even more absurd to play. Long live the amazing splashing sound when you get eaten!
Gameplay
Professor Lupo and his horrible pets is a top-down puzzle-adventure game. You directly are thrown into the game, quite literally. You play as the intern who needs to showcase how the ‘not so smart’ monsters get their prey. Even if they are still caged, try not to die when you are near those vicious monsters, as the demonstration can go awry. You start out giving a demonstration in front of the whole warlord squad your boss has summoned, all because he wants to sell these monsters to bring even more terror upon our planet.
You find yourself in maze-like chambers with computer operating systems, foes and portals. Your goal is to get from the starting point to the end-portal in the room, without getting brutally devoured. All of this sounds easy enough, right? The only advantage you get in the beginning is that the rooms are small and that the strategic puzzles are fairly simple.
The computer operating systems they use are mainly for opening doors. These will, in turn, give the monsters in that room another path they can crawl through. Most rooms come with a lot of computer operating systems that have different colors, which are of course of certain importance. The colors of the computer operating system are also displayed above certain doors. Logically you can only open the door with the same color on it. This adds a level of complexity to the game because if you don’t time the use of one or more computer operating systems right, you’re dead.
When you progress further in the game you come across a lot of different monsters with each having their specific traits. A lot of monsters can only take a certain path or have a lot of flaws which creates opportunities for you to get past them. The traits of each monster can be read in your archive. Oddly, we found ourselves casually walking every time an alien was chasing us. Maybe, just a little jog or running should be implemented in the game.
When we look at the controls for the Switch version of the game we stumble upon a few flaws. Playing with the analog sticks and buttons can get a bit tedious because you need to focus your controller on the screen to actually open certain doors. This means you’ll have to sit right in front of your TV, aim the controller towards the TV set as you’ll get a cursor that you need to use to click on the PC monitors. This made us die a lot of times by unintentionally clicking the wrong button or just not focussing fast enough on the right position of the screen. In handheld mode, this problem doesn’t occur, because you can make use of the touchscreen instead. It would have been nice if the developers simply added a button tap command for the monitors when playing in docked mode.
Conclusion
Professor Lupo and his horrible pets has some good and bad points. Players who enjoy puzzle games with a decent amount of strategic thinking will have a decent amount of fun with this one, even with the tedious controls in place. The setting of this game is not for everyone though because of the ironic jokes and absurd creatures who lurk around in the chambers. But jokes aside, the artwork is great and makes the game visually very fun to play through.
Professor Lupo and his horrible pets - Review,
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[…] in 2019, Professor Lupo and his Horrible Pets made its debut, ending with a cliffhanger ending. Fast forward a year and a half and we’re […]