All canines are accounted for in "Heir of the Dog"!

Let's get ready to rumble!

After finally finding my way past the pea-soup fog separating the west from the east side of London in Heir of the Dog, I had a whole new area to explore, once again inhabited by some colourful - and sometimes rather slimy - characters giving me a hard time to progress. But this time I had a four-legged friend with me: Sally the poodle, very sweetly voiced by Sally Beaumont I might add, and no, I'm not just saying that because I had the honor of spending a little time with her during the recent AdventureX weekend in real-life London! She's a BAFTA Breakthrough and she definitely deserves that!

Lots of prison breaks in this game...

After some more puzzling around on the east side of the Thames, I discovered another secret location where I expected to encounter the villains of the story. Following a couple of surprises and twists, the game went in a totally different direction than I had anticipated. But even then there came a moment when I looked at the scene in front of me and thought I was completely convinced that I had figured out the way Tom Hardwidge would be ending this story - only to realize a couple of hours later that my imagination was running a bit too wild even for this crazy creative Brit who likes to doodle intentionally disgusting monsters on dinner napkins.

On my way to save the day!

The final part of the game had me recruiting a couple of other dogs - including Sally again - to plan something I can only describe as a huge heist. First I had to convince them to actually join my team. And then, when the heist was under way, it was fun switching between all those dogs and be able to play as them as well instead of with Cummerbund alone. It was the epitome of what makes Heir of the Dog such a fun game, and to be honest even more enjoyable than the sometimes obscure dream-jumping puzzles in Lucy Dreaming.

The end!

Testing Heir of the Dog took me almost 18 hours, but that includes taking notes of bugs and glitches and doing things over and over again. But the game itself kept track of my playthrough as well, and not counting the time I had played but then went back to an earlier save, this put me at a total of roughly 11 hours and 15 minutes. Which I think is a pretty decent length for an adventure game today. It also kept track of the number of in-game days I spent in this version of Victorian London. After all, each transformation between man and dog always skipped ahead to the next morning or night respectively. And apparently it took 37 days for Cummerbund Bandersnatch from first drinking his uncle's concoction to the end credits - where you'll find my name as well, by the way!

You can find Heir of the Dog on Steam and on GOG!