Dress-Up Pups Puts Dogs on the Catwalk - video game

Anawiki Games and Retrostyle Games have announced the release of their joint venture, Dress-Up Pups. With cute graphics and hilarious dialogue, the game offers several variations on the ever-popular Match-3 style of gameplay.

The game follows the story of Pattie, who's been working as office help at the Dress-Up Pups fashion agency for dogs. When her boss has to fly overseas on important business, she's left in charge of the agency, and has to come up with creative outfits for a variety of eccentric clients. The dogs, their owners, their exchanges with Pattie, and the resulting outfits are all designed for maximum surprise and hilarity; there are no "ordinary" clients at Dress-Up Pups!

"Dogs in clothes are inherently pretty silly," says Budzowski, "so we decided to just run with that and go over the top and make the clients as out-there as the dogs. They've all got these exaggerated personalities, like a pop star, or the ambassador's wife. There are even more unlikely ones, but I don't want to spoil all the surprises."

Dress-Up Pups provides the player with a varied challenge, by mixing standard "swap" Match-3 mechanics with alternative "chains" and "group" modes. The player is also provided with two forms of power-ups - Tools, which are gradually charged up by matching specific icons, and Bonuses, which appear in the grid as a reward for a big match or combo. Additionally, each chapter of the story ends with a jigsaw puzzle mini-game, in which the player helps Pattie piece together the final outfit.

With 21 chapters, each consisting of several levels, and 10 different customers, each with a different breed of dog, Dress-Up Pups provides long-lasting gameplay, with lots of laughs along the way.

This is the first-ever joint project for both developers. Whereas Anawiki has a lot of programming talent on staff, Retrostyle consists predominantly of artists, so the partnership was a match made in heaven.

"It was great working with the guys at Retrostyle," says Anawiki owner and lead developer Roman Budzowski, "They came to us for help with this game as a work in progress, when they weren't sure what direction to take it in. They had all this great artwork already done, and for us, getting high quality stuff on an indie budget is always a challenge. So I suggested we work together to finish the game, and we're all delighted with the results."

Purchase: http://www.anawiki.com/buy/dress-up-pups?os=mac