Dogolrax
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5.00
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You awake on an unknown planet with amnesia.
What are those horrific monsters?
Who are these mysterious priestesses?
You will explore a bizarre, grotesque and captivating world filled with surprises.
Inspired by cult classics such as “Another World/Out of this World”, “Flashback” and other cult classics, Dogolrax aims to surprise you in ways few games have before by introducing constant changes in gameplay, environment, monsters, dialog and plot twists.
Expect the unexpected plus a good dose of humor, gore, tease and varied gameplay.
Steam User 22
A lot of games that shoot for surreal atmospheres miss the mark, because it’s not that easy to defy the boundaries of reality. Dogolrax succeeds in a way that I’m not entirely sure was intentional, because it seems to dance all over the line between surrealism and satire. From the moment you start it up you’ll be thoroughly lost in a world of grisly monsters and mechanical horrors that comment about your gaming prowess and their porn browsing history. It’s the only game I can think of where I’ve cut myself down from a rope with a cleaver in someone else’s head and then crawled broken into a monster uterus to be reborn, and if the actual game part played better that would be a hell of an achievement.
I considered outlining the first few minutes of the game here but it’s something you really should experience for yourself. There are dreams, carnivorous aliens, a vagina elevator, arcade machines, and a big-breasted anime girl that mix in ways you are definitely not expecting. It only gets stranger from there as you make your way through the ravaged bodies of enormous, living creatures to battle monks and priestesses that look like they were private commissions from DeviantArt. The story will make sense eventually but like I said it’s half-satire, so anyone showing up for serious horror or intrigue is going to be turned off. And so will the folks looking for anime boobs, just so you know, because they’re not the focus you might be expecting here.
What Dogolrax is is an adventure platformer in the vein of Out Of This World. Your hapless protagonist is just some dude, trapped on a planet that defies his attempts to make sense of its gruesome ecology. You’ll have to do a fair bit of experimenting to figure out what’s safe and what isn’t, what’s a door and what’s a deadly maw, and so on. It’s not a world you have to learn the rules of, though, because the challenges change constantly and most of your time is spent running from one scene to the next anyway. There are significant changes of pace to expect though, including side-scrolling shooting sections, swimming sections, and other more esoteric obstacles to overcome.
Grab-bags like this can make for compelling experiences, but unfortunately Dogolrax is cobbled together with what feels like the lowest possible level of design skill. Your controls are unthinkably inconsistent, giving you tight turn-on-a-dime action on one screen and greased-shoes-on-ice pratfalls on the next. This carries over to the other game modes, where some might have pixel-perfect movement and others have momentum-based messes to struggle with. Hit detection is just as messy, with hitboxes for everything significantly larger than they appear. This can be infuriating in sections with spike-lined walls or randomly-ricocheting balls of death, and doubly so in the game’s many inexplicable Breakout-clone levels.
If bad controls are a dealbreaker for you, then by all means stay away from this mad ball of blood and offal. Normally it is for me, but the developers have made certain allowances for it that helped me get through the full 90-minute adventure. Most areas with any sort of challenge have easy and hard paths, and both tend to be very generous with checkpointing practically every screen. There’s at least one awful sequence where you have to ride a melting mutant through an acid bath that will straight-up let you skip ahead if you die too many times, a feature I was all too happy to make use of.
It feels cheap, looks a mess, and can’t decide if it’s body horror or bad satire, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. The weirdness is just intense enough to keep surprising me every couple of scenes, and the bizarre story concepts hooked me into seeing how the whole mess ended. The gameplay is borderline terrible, but not bad enough to keep you from powering through and seeing more twisted mutants and inexplicable anime girls. Its story and themes may be inscrutable, but they’re the kind that shock and entertain and that’s enough to earn a nod from me.
Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at
Steam User 14
A true love/hate relationship... but worth it if you're patient and appreciate surreal art.
Love:
The art is incredible and it is evident that the devs are VERY creative minds. Give Salvador Dali a ton of acid, let him watch some Dr. Seuss, and give him a canvas - there is your art direction. The writing is cute and funny without being too much of a meme (has some typos/grammar issues though.) The soundtrack quality is right up there with the visual art; great chiptunes, awesome ambience, and a lot of nostalgic arcade jams. It feels like each song was crafted specifically for the environment in which it plays. Also, anime girls. Everyone can appreciate that.
Hate:
The controls and keybinds are gross and my controller wouldn't work in any capacity. They are fine for exploring all the cool shit, but horrible for actual gameplay. The gameplay has platforming, really tight timing levels, and bullet-hell aspects but with messy controls it is SUPER frustrating. A lot of false difficulty, in the sense that it doesn't take skill or thought but is just difficult by circumstance. They give you multiple paths labled easier or harder, but they all suck in the end and don't seem to give you more of a benefit for opting to take the harder route.
Overall:
I think that it was a really worthwhile experience based solely upon the artistic direction. If you don't appreciate that sort of thing and prefer mechanical polish instead or are just really impatient with BS gameplay elements then I would recommend passing on Dogolrax.
Steam User 7
This game has no idea what it wants to be, and the gameplay isn't going to do it many favors either.
..but if you want to spend a solid hour or two desperately trying to figure out what this game IS, it might be the game for you. The core is a marginally more forgiving Flashback, there's some meatboy-esque sections, some scrolling SHMUP sections (left/right and vertical), some breakout and space invader style levels, a dash of maze with collectible coins, some visual-novel anime pinups, a creature that looks like a giant fetus, another that shits out a clone of itself periodically (and has a level based around this mechanic, because you ride it from place to place...)...
The sense of humor is a little childish at times, and the further in you go, the more aware you become that the lead writer's native language was not English. ...but this game has that weird special something that makes me think it could become a cult classic, and also I sort of want to see it get a sequel.
It could be much better than it is, especially if it picked a core gameplay theme and ran with it, but it's not bad, and I was fascinated the entire way through.
Steam User 33
This game is such a bizarre combination of amazing, WTF and terrible, I have no idea what it's going for, but it's mesmerizing nonetheless.
The story is nonsensical - a mishmash of every pulp sci-fi idea out there! Amnesiac earth scientist on an alien planet, girls with giant... mechs, evil biomancer cult, visions of godesses... And none of it takes itself serious even for a second, with a wildly shifting tone and tense situations interrupted by dumb goofs.
The art is weird. Most of the time it's a slightly amateurish replication of a mix between Another World and Shadow of the Beast with not-so-subtle sexual elements, but every now and again there are very cleanly drawn big-breasted anime girls that just don't fit in at all.
...And I have no problem with any of the above. What I DO have an issue with, is just how shoddily put together this game is. Assets are combined regardless of scale, animations glitch and jump around, controls are imprecise and just don't feel right (jump repeats if you hold it down, sometimes you walk up and down the stairs by just walking, other times the game asks you to press a button), collision is weird and inconsistent, scenes transition super abruptly, and the whole time it feels like it's held together with spit and duct tape (par for the course for Construct on a sloppy side for a Multimedia Fusion 2 game).
As it is, not everyone will find this game an acceptable waste of $4-$5. It really, really needs more polish. But if you can tolerate the amateurish presentation and enjoy creative weirdness punctuated by anime boоbs and dumb humor, definitely give this game a try!
Steam User 6
Short game full of preposterous circumstances and dark humour.
Forgiving for those who just want to see the game and reach the end but ridiculously challenging in an 80's Arcade style for those who... just want to challenge themselves really.
Strives to surprise you at every corner.
A+
Steam User 17
WTF I just played? O_o
Well, it's indeed a kind of platformer and adventure game and there are absolutely absurd amounts of ways to die. “A Million WTF to Die in the Dogolrax” as told another guy in his review. Including incredibly hilarious. You found yourself on an alien planet with amnesia and without any clue who you are, why are you here and how can you get back to Earth and majority of locals are NOT friendly even remotely and either want to kill you or transform into another monstrosity.
To save your nerves I don't recommend playing it with a gamepad (joystick). It seems like character either stays still or runs like a madman and there are nothing in between. As the result you will die and die again not due to lack of skill but due to lack of control. Keyboard allows more precise control with short key presses. Also, game may randomly switch back to keyboard mode. Yes, they have a switch between keyboard and gamepad. Guess what you have to do to use it again? Eeyep, you have to press “J” on keyboard... Have you seen something more stupid?
Overall story is very simplistic and art style is not very consistent with all these occasional sexy anime priestesses of Dogolrax everywhere. However, the rest looks consistent enough, so i's bearable.
Overall I can't call it a good game. It's average. But it's good enough to spend a few hours in the company of strange monsters and occasional anime girls. So, in case you have nothing else to do you can try Dogolrax. At least this is a game and not yet another asset flip or achievements crapstorm.
Steam User 8
This is one of the most bizarre games I've ever played.
Also, animu waifus.
Edit 2023: This game is terrible actually. I came back to it in November 2019 to put the other 1.3 hours in, and I absolutely hated it. So much jank. As far as I can tell it's inspired by heart of darkness but the game plays (and often looks) like a bad 2000's flash game. I remember playing a janky shmup section towards the end and I think that was the thing that broke me. It was so incredibly bad and basically a microcosm of the game as a whole. Which is a shame cause I wanted to like it.
I will say that the first bit of the game was enjoyable, from what I remember. But after a while you start getting hit with clunky minigames (I refer you again to the really bad shmup minigame) and the game quickly turns into a boring and frustrating slog