Sometimes I wish I was a dog. All I would have to do all day is walk around the house, be cute, sit when told to, eat food and sleep. It’s a simple life and would be a nice change of pace from my life now. Clockwork Demon is out to simulate this with their upcoming game, Adopted.
Adopted tells the story of a newly adopted Boston Terrier dog named Luchador. The dog is out to explore the house and watch over the owners as they carry on with their everyday lives. The game is played in a first-person view from the perspective of the dog. You can sniff, bark and chew on objects. What you do with the objects can influence the owner’s actions and decisions and can potentially change the course of the game. For example, in the kitchen if you grab a glass and throw it on the ground your owner will stop what he is doing and walk over towards the glass to clean it up.
The demo begins with you being let of your cage by your owner. You are given brief tutorials as you approach objects. Use the mouse to look and the WASD buttons to move around. You can hit the E button to bark and left-click to grab objects. If you left-click the owner, he will talk to you. Eventually, he goes into the living room with some food and watches TV. You can follow him into the room and crouch under the table to hide. Actually, I managed to get trapped by crawling under the chair he ended up sitting in. Once he sat down I was unable to get out of it. Anything you can interact with is highlighted to give you an idea that you can do something with it. Unfortunately, the demo did not let you experiment with it as much as I would have liked. It was also very short, as you only have access to a couple of areas. I believe that the demo’s main purpose was to showcase some of the basic functionality of the game and give you a small bite of what they can do with the engine. To be fair, what is here works, and, hopefully, Clockwork Demon can greatly expand on the concept.
The graphics are cel-shaded and the textures are in black and white to symbolize the dog’s colorblindness. There was no music in the demo except when your owner turned on the television. Hopefully, the final version has a nice soundtrack to go along with the gameplay. The final product is said to be compatible with the Oculus Rift. I can see this being very amusing with that thing on. Unfortunately, I do not have one, so there will be no footage of me crawling around the room on all fours. Based on the demo, it is clear the game still has quite a bit more to go as far as development is concerned. Clockwork Demon is aiming for a 2016 release date. Hopefully, we will get more updates as they progress with the development. Adopted is a game that I recommend following as it is a nice take on a first-person adventure game and has potential to be something really cool.
