After playing To The Rescue for quite a few hours on my rest day yesterday, I decided I am going to do a full post on it after all. I was on the fence because I did encounter some bugs, but in… *checks* Holy crow that was 10 hours! In 10 hours of on and off gameplay I only ran into one bug that actually required a restart and happened more than once. Still not ideal for a game that was released in November of 2021, but I’m very much enjoying the game as a whole!
To The Rescue is a cute little indie game I did not get in that Humble Bundle set. I’d been looking at it ever since I was doing my shelter fundraiser. I was trying to find themed animal games to play for the donation streams. I ended up going with Animal Shelter Simulator – a game I wound up loving, and should definitely post about – but I always meant to come back and check this one out as well.
Small trigger warning: You can toggle the option but if your shelter gets too full, you either send an animal away or elect to euthanize. You can play the game with the euthanasia option toggled off. I’m actually playing with that option toggled off since I already deal with animal death at work (though never for space) and I don’t want the added stress in my gaming. I do appreciate it being there in service of being realistic, though.
To the Rescue has the player running a dog shelter – no cats in this one, I’m afraid! You intake the pets, make sure they are cared for, try to get them adopted out, and design and manage the shelter itself. Very building and management with animals, a theme I enjoy.
As an additional point in its favor, 20% of the proceeds of this game are going to real life shelters through the developer’s partnership with the PetFinder Foundation.
Like I said yesterday, there’s parts of the game I very much appreciate as someone who does actually work in an animal shelter. The player has no control over when or how many animals arrive at their shelter, they have the option to vaccinate them before they get sick, and the animals show a wide variety of both positive and negative traits as the shelter holds them longer and gets to know them better. This game also has an option to build a foster network, which is a very neat touch. You can also apply for grants that require completing certain tasks – like vaccinating a certain number of dogs or keeping your welfare percentage over a certain amount.
The adoption process works differently than in Animal Shelter Simulator. The adopters come in at random times, and with random preferences. Sometimes they know exactly what sort of dog they want, and sometimes they just want a dog. The player has 5 show kennels, to show them 5 dogs of their choosing.
The adopters have a built in resistance to adopting, measured by a bar at the top of the screen, and your job is to increase their desire to adopt past that measure of resistance. You can do this by finding dogs that suit their requests, or just by choosing highly adoptable dogs to show. The adopters will then choose one of the dogs, and not always the one you expect. This sounds simple, but I feel like it’s such a great way to show how adoptions aren’t something (in many shelters) that’s simple or always goes the way you expect. While there are private rescues that use applications to match specific adopters with specific animals, the shelters I’ve worked at are far more open in their adoptions.
There’s options to run events in town to build up donations or reputation – I love that Spay/Neuter education events are one of them! The events do not have gameplay to them, you just select the event on a map and then the event happens in the timeframe indicated. Which honestly is fine. It would take a lot to make a bunch of different mini games for events, and I feel like that would take a lot of time away from the actual management and animal care part of the game.
There is an animal care portion of the game, though once you get enough animals you really do need to hire some staff to help. Feeding, watering, cleaning, etc. I appreciate that this option is highly customizable. At any point I can assign my staff to different tasks. If I want to do a particular task, I just have to un-assign the staff and then I’m free to do that task myself. This gives me a lot of flexibility over how I spend my time in game. I mostly handle the vaccinating and enrichment (in this game, play time!) for my dogs, but when I had a grant task to wash a certain number of dogs, I just took my staff off that duty for a bit.
Also on flexibility, the player can adjust many options for difficulty, from how fast time passes to how expensive end of day fees are, to how open to adopting the community is. I freaking love this. I was JUST talking the other day about how sometimes cozy management games stress me out and this is the perfect example of how to set one up for me. At any point, I can increase or decrease the pressure easily.
I am super glad I did NOT try too hard to struggle with the Story Mode for this game, though. It has what looks like a great little story mode with a tutorial…but after the tutorial (which doesn’t quite cover every mechanic) the player is immediately thrown into a very busy, short staffed, overfull shelter. This is stunning from a realism point of view, not as much from a gameplay one. I hesitate to count this against the game just because it’s not the only one I’ve played where the story mode was much more difficult than the free play mode. And since the freeplay mode does still have its own tutorial, I think it does work out – it just might get confusing to gamers like me who always gravitate to Story Mode first.
As for the bugs, there were a couple times dogs bugged out but not in a way that prevented me from playing. One day the adopters got stuck and I had a stack of three of them on top of each other until the next day. The real headache was that there’s a certain corner your character can get stuck in between the door and the main feeding station, and that happened to me twice. This is a path you’ll take a lot if you’re actively feeding the dogs, especially as there are 4 different food types. The “Unstuck” option in the menu didn’t work, and I was forced to reset. This is made more of an issue because the game only saves at the end of each day. So any bug that you have to reset for, erases a day’s worth of progress.
Since the days are all different, it’s not quite as bad as having to play through a section of a game you’ve already done, but it also means you’re not going to get the same day again if something happened that you really wanted to retain. For me, this is a, “Not ideal but the game is still playable and I’m still having fun,” sort of bug, but I understand that for others it might be enough to not want to play.
I’ve got To The Rescue set up to stream tonight, so there will be video coming soon!
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