Attention Neopets kids
I've spent the last few days playing an open beta of a uh... a website... a game that is a website... called Dog Online. It is extraordinarily good at replicating the exact impact that Neopets had on me as a child.
Dog Online does not have a lot of content right now and definitely is a beta. You should be normal about it if you check it out. I was debating whether I should post about it at all... it does seem like it would not benefit from too many attention laser beams pointed at it. But I did want to talk about the way in which it evokes a specific kind of Neopetsiness to me.
Neopets was basically a kind of web art experiment (and also a marketing trojan horse for children). It was full of weird little corners and secrets and flash hotspots, and the whole site felt like a puzzle you could only progress by exploring in many directions at once. Some activities yielded items which could only be used in completely different parts of the site. Some activities required you to explore everything and try weird stuff and click on shit that looked uninteractive and swap rumors with other players. The site itself, the top layer of abstraction you used to access all the actual flash games and web activities, also felt like a weird meta-game that you'd slowly unfold. Everything had layers, secrets, and handmade rabbitholes.
I haven't played any other "virtual pet" game or webgame experience that achieved this kind of experience. But Dog Online gets pretty close! Fallen London had some overlap for me, but being a weird obtuse puzzlebox was not really its goal. Dog Online really gets what was weird and cool about Neopets the site.
It's got a lot already but is clearly in a beta state. Again, please be normal if you check it out. I think it's very special and I'm excited to see where it goes!! And if you know me IRL, get ahold of me on Discord so that we can swap friend codes...