Professor Lupo and His Horrible Pets

Genre: Top-Down Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Professor Lupo and His Horrible Pets is a character-based Top-Down Puzzle game released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2019. This game takes place on a space station where the titular mad scientist has invited warlords from Earth to bid on his collection of killer alien creatures. However, shortly after things get started, the space station is attacked and the creatures are set loose. Players take the role of an intern trying to escape the space station while not getting horribly killed by said creatures.

The presentation here makes use of detailed 2D backgrounds and well-animated cartoony 2D characters, with plenty of green slime and fun death animations. This is joined by some fun, silly voice acting and a subdued soundtrack. All of this does a good job giving this game a personality of its own.

The gameplay here is fairly simple – you move your character around in corridors on the spaceship and open and close doors to proceed to the exit square in each of the game’s levels. Some doors can be opened remotely, while others require the use of computer terminals. Using this, and your knowledge of how the creatures behave, you need to safely get to the exit.

While it’s a simple premise, the different creature behaviors make for some good variety and some interesting puzzles. What’s more, players can control the game using traditional gamepad controls or gyroscopic pointer controls. The latter seem too imprecise to be reliable, but it’s nice that they’re included here all the same.

Unfortunately, this is all undone by one major problem – your character’s walking speed is torturously slow – the intern you’re controlling clearly isn’t in much of a rush to escape, and can’t be bothered to put any haste into his movements, despite his life being on the line. While this is surely an element of the gameplay, it nevertheless makes even the simple act of moving around extremely irritating, slowing the game’s overall pace and sapping the fun out of things.

Perhaps more patient players will still enjoy Professor Lupo and His Horrible Pets, and I do think the game’s theme and presentation make things interesting, but the snail’s pace of your character makes this entire experience a slog, and I don’t recommend it.

tl;dr – Professor Lupo and His Horrible Pets is a character-based Top-Down Puzzle game where players take the role of an intern on a space station trying to escape from hostile alien creatures. The theme and presentation here are great, and the puzzles are well-designed, but everything is brought to a screeching halt due to how agonizingly slow your character’s movements are, killing the pacing and making this game almost unbearable to play unless you’re an especially patient and forgiving player.

Grade: C

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