3/5 ★ – PhatBaby's review of Zoochosis.

Zoochosis, my guy, I love your energy. I'd get a beer with your messy ass. I love the sheer moxy; the carefree, ah, well let's just throw everything at a wall and see what sticks attitude. You're flying free, baby. We all see it. Half of this is a sophisticated adult trying to make something unique. It casts you as a zookeeper in the middle of a bizarre experiment, and you have to test the animals, figure out which one's a Cronenbergian monster in disguise, and then cure or kill it to save the zoo. It wants you to play Kurt Russel in The Thing, and you're going around doing that gnarly blood test to identify the traitor. And for a game that looked like it was a low-budget indie, I love how damn original that concept is. Taking a zookeeper simulator and flipping the script so it's a horror game. Huge kudos for such a dope idea. But then it would crack me up every time, because, without fail, its edgy ten-year-old side would appear and decide "THIS IS BORING. The kangaroo you were saving now has a giant mouth on its stomach and it can phase in and out of reality using its ghost realm powers to put you in its mouth and digest you whole." One minute you're saving the zebra enclosure using detective work to figure out which animal's sick; the next Savannah the zebra has a mouth growing out of her ass crack and she's trying to eat your face, turning the game into a clunky-ass first-person shooter with no rules except AHHHHHHHHH. RED LIGHTS. ZEBRA ASSHOLE MOUTH. SHOOT. SHOOT. SHOOT. The writing and voice acting are like you're in a fever dream that you just have to accept to move forward. It tries to explain mechanics that make no sense before conceding and going, ah, these fundamental gameplay ideas aren't really important. THERE ARE 23 ENDINGS THOUGH?!? They're exactly the same... but CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT!? It's a car crash that you really want to be in just to see what on earth it's going to do next. And when the dust settles and the credits roll, they completely unironically just throw up a message saying: "hippo unlocked." But by that point, you've bought into the chaotic energy that is Zoochosis, so you're kicking your little feet and screaming YOOOOOOO, NO WAY!!!! Grab the beers. Grab the homies. Zoochosis is the only thing you need to play until you die.