‘Zoochosis’ Review – Tedious Gameplay and Cliche Story Fail to Live Up to Eye-Catching Concept

A great way to create horror is to take something that’s supposed to spark joy, then twist it into something sinister. Pennywise from It, the animatronic horrors of Five Nights at Freddy’s, and Doki Doki Literature Club all understand this concept and wield it like a knife.

Clapperheads’ new game Zoochosis applies this concept to zoos, twisting the normally adorable animals into nightmarish beasts worthy of John Carpenter’s The Thing. While this is a great concept, a lot of the gameplay focus seems to be on the more the process of the mundane aspects of the zoo rather than the horrors that lie within.

It starts out simply, but mysteriously. You take an overnight job at a zoo in order to help you and your family get out of poverty, except nothing is right with the place. It’s been closed for a long time and no one knows why, but it needs night staff to take care of the animals. It feels like a good setup, but the spooky parts of it feel very obvious and cliche in ways that don’t ever feel like they find their own unique angle. There are a couple moments like lore notes and calls from other characters that started to fill in things going on, but it never felt like we got too far past “whoa something weird is happening here” in terms of complexity. On top of that, the character, who has voiced interactions with other NPCs never really vocally reacts to what he sees, making for a strange disconnect.

The gameplay of Zoochosis is a lot more process-focused than I was anticipating. Your main focus as the night goes on is taking care of and curing the animals that are in the zoo in a fairly structured way. There’s a little train that goes between enclosures, and on that train is everything you’ll need to feed and diagnose the zoo creatures. First you’ll have to make the food, which comes with its own little minigame where you’re trying to appropriately cut different blocks of food in order to create what each animal needs. Once you get that done, you load it onto your cart and head to the enclosures for each of the animals.

The bulk of your activities take place here. You’ll drop off the food for the animals, then follow them around and check on them with various tools on your cart, which gives the action a very tactile quality. They’ll be multiple of each animal in the pen, and you need to perform four checks on them: take their temperature, grab a stool sample, listen for audio abnormalities and draw some blood. Most of this is laid out in an extremely handholding tutorial that literally walks you through each step, while still feeling like it leaves things out. Each test requires a different tool, but you can only hold two tools at once, so expect to go back and forth to your little cart quite a bit. On top of that, the stool and blood samples need to be brought back to the train for analysis, so these simple tests require a lot of pacing around the environment in ways that feel more like a time tax than anything mechanically interesting.

Once you check all these, you’ll see which of them show signs of infection and use that to determine what they are specifically suffering from. Issues with stool and blood mean one thing, while the combination of audio and temperature abnormalities means another. With this information, you can synthesize a cure that’s delivered via dart gun. It reminded me a bit of the way Phasmaphobia has you using evidence to narrow down the entity you’re dealing with, but this was a lot more rigid and structured in a way that didn’t feel dynamic or complex. There’s not really any risk as you’re doing these tests, it’s just about the time it takes for you to do them, as some animals may be agitated enough that they need to be tranquillized before you can draw their blood. There’s so many moving parts here, and unfortunately none of them really felt fun for me to actually do. Your mileage may vary depending on how much you like more process-oriented games, but this didn’t do much for me.

The real reason this game went viral when it was revealed was the compelling way it transforms its animals into absolute horrors. Heads split open and bodies distend, warping the formerly cute creatures into something more menacing. I’m pretty sure it when it happens is highly scripted, but It never quite felt clear to me if this was the result of something I was neglecting, which goes against the very mechanical nature of the animal care gameplay. Once this transformation happens, the game shifts you into its version of combat, which is fairly rudimentary. You need to either make a more specific cure or use lethal rounds to handle the rampaging monster.

While this all sounds well and good, it doesn’t feel great in play. The aiming feels really squirrelly, zooming in too far when you aim down sights. At this level of zoom, your dart gun takes up so much of the screen and the sensitivity of the mouse aiming feels so cranked up that it’s hard to get a bead on your target. There’s a very cartoony heart meter that comes up on the screen when you’re in battle, letting you know you need to hit the monster three times to deal with it. Creatures will attack both you and the other healthy animals, so you’ve got to try to keep track of it as it skitters around the stage. I’m not sure if it was a bug, but one time the enclosure was so dark when the fight started that I had to turn up the game’s brightness to 200% to even be able to see anything that was going on. For something that should be the central focus of the game, it’s a shame that it didn’t feel better.

My hope with the game was that it would set up this routine, then subvert it in clever ways in order to keep you off balance or progress the story. There definitely are some things that the game leads you into doing activities that are outside of the objectives you’re given, but they don’t really lead to anything substantive. Nothing about the story revelations is particularly surprising, and the writing doesn’t do anything to elevate it beyond basic cliches. The devs said there are many endings, and so there’s definitely more than I saw in my two playthroughs.

When you beat the game, which took me around two hours, you’ll unlock a New Game+ mode that adds an additional animal. As far as I could tell in my two runs, aside from skipping the tutorial, the new animal was the only difference. I was able to make different choices and dig a bit deeper on some of the mysteries of the zoo, but it did not change up anything gameplay wise, making for the same frustrating experience. Its short runtime does make it more appealing to replay if you’re interested in trying to discover more secrets, there wasn’t that much there in what I discovered.

The visuals of the game are a bit of a mixed bag. The environments overall look high quality, but don’t have a lot of personality to them outside of ‘generic grungy industrial building.’ A lot of the locations have some good set dressing that make it feel lived in, but none of them have their own visual style that makes them stand out. The environments of the enclosures are a bit more customized to the specific animal, but even those can look pretty same-y. The creatures themselves have pretty gruesome designs, but they are often undermined by unpolished animations that have a tendency to clip through the environment from time to time. One last visual thing to mention is the much advertised bodycam visual style. It’s barely relevant fictionally, and all it does is fisheye the view a bit, which didn’t really enhance my experience at all.

It always pains me to write reviews like this, because Zoochosis was so eye-catching during its initial reveal. There’s definitely potential in combining more process-oriented gameplay with horror themes, using it to lull you into a false sense of security and allowing you to deviate from the routine to find the real game beneath the surface, but I didn’t find the content I discovered compelling enough to pull me through gameplay that I found tedious. There’s always hope that it could be iterated on in future updates, but it feels like its flaws are so baked into the core gameplay loop that I’m not sure if it will get there for me.

Review key provided by publisher.

Zoochosis is available now on Steam.