Pupper Park lets you muck around as a dog for 10 minutes
Barking up the right tree
Landlords might currently forbid me from owning a pooch of my own, but Sokpop's Pupper Park lets me become one instead. There's comfort in that, I think. Put aside the troubling concerns that come with being human. Ditch work, to hell with the groceries. Let's go chase a ball, harass some toads, irritate the hell out of every other pup in a colourful park for a glorious ten minutes.
Nobody even needs clean up the mess.
Pupper Park is a freeform dog sim, letting you off the leash in a vibrant park for ten minutes to go do... well, dog things. Pick up sticks! Scare frogs! Bark!
Just like real-life dog parks (probably), Pupper Park is full of secrets to uncover. Scoring some sweet basketball dunks or strike a ball into the back of the net lands you a bone. It's more fun just living life care-free as a bobble-headed dog, though, messing around with what feel like Sokpop's wobbliest physics yet. Frogs, trees, flowers and other pops would regularly stretch far into the sky before snapping back to earth like unbreakable rubber bands.
You'll stumble across those bones eventually just by mucking around. But this isn't a private park, and it wasn't until roughly five minutes in that I really noticed the rest of the park's canine pup-ulation. Other dogs, it turns out, are bastards. This pair of mischievous lads nicked my favourite ball in the middle of a canine kick-about. My human, useless as ever, did nothing.
Thankfully, another player can jump in with a press of the spacebar, giving you a more reliable pooch to much around with. Like most Sokpop Collective's games, it's a cheap and cheerful little timekiller that I recommend giving a quick bash. It's quite similar to delightful sandbox Digital Bird Playground, albeit with fewer whimsical birds. Pupper Park is, at least, currently playable - if you didn't get into the Bird Playground back then, you're locked out for good. Sorry.
Pupper Park can be picked up on Itch for £2/$3. As always, it's available to Sokpop patrons - along with future games - for that same amount each month.