Zookeeping horror game Zoochosis is out on September 23.
Zoochosis bills itself as a “bodycam horror simulation game,” and I’m not going to say that’s inaccurate. But at Summer Game Fest last month I played most of the opening hour of Zoochosis and had no idea what to make of it, because it was far more bizarre and awkward than horrifying.
The first-person game put me in the shoes of a first-day-on-the-job zookeeper being walked through the basics in a facility that was clearly messed up. The place was grimy, they locked me in overnight, and when an obvious human body in a bodybag was lowered into a grinder to create logs of meat for the animals, my character was oddly unfazed. Same for the first jumpscare, which arrived about 50 minutes in, after I’d spent a fair amount of time clunkily navigating a train back and forth between animal pens, waiting for them to freak out and go monster mode on me. Instead I just pet a sick giraffe and took some penguins’ temperatures. When a monster of some sort did lunge at me facehugger-style, my character fought it off and then… I just had to keep doing zoo things?
Perhaps the psychosis bit of Zoochosis is that your character never acknowledges they are in a horror game and no-sells every increasingly messed up thing they encounter. The above trailer shows an unwell kangaroo puking from its toothy mouth-stomach, a hippo that looks related to Dark Souls’ Gaping Dragon, and what I’m pretty sure is a zebra with a pair of chompers where its asshole should be.
I wish I’d run into any of that in my demo, which dedicated entirely too much time trying to establish the zoo’s “normalcy” before it goes psycho. We know it’s gonna go psycho! It’s in the name! Let’s get on with it.
But hey, I know pacing is tough in horror. You can’t start with the no-head-ass-mouth-zebra. A freaky-from-the-jump zoo wouldn’t let you tell the narrative of a normal guy descending deeper and deeper into madness. I’m not sure Zoochosis is actually up to doing much with that narrative, though, so I hope the final game speeds things up from the demo I played. I’m also skeptical the “simulation” bit of Zoochosis—where you’re operating chonky tools to feed the animals, take their temperature readings, and vaccinate them—will hold up to a full game’s worth of play without feeling tedious.
But it’s a great premise, and maybe there’s a perfect audience out there for horror fans who also want to make sure they feed penguins the precise 14 kilograms of food they require to remain happy in between encounters with gaping hippos.
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