About A Game: Puppet Zoo Pilomy (PSX)
Puppet Zoo Pilomy, developed and published by Human Entertainment, is one of those games that feel more like some kind of toy than a typical videogame. It doesn’t really give you any goals, or guide you along, and you mostly have to decide for yourself when you’re satisfied and done with the game. Added to that, it also has a strange creepy undercurrent that is almost constantly present, but never really leads anywhere. All in all, it’s a curiosity that probably won’t hold most people’s interest for very long.
It only came out in Japan, but curiously has a full English localization built in, selectable from the main menu, so at least this time there is no language barrier.
In Puppet Zoo Pilomy, you’re playing a child accompanied by their little alien buddy Pilomy. Your town’s scientist Dr. Polygon invites you to his lab, showing off his new invention: “Puppets”, artificial animals that can be assembled from parts. Our esteemed scientist has built a big slot machine in his lab, which spits out puppet parts. The parts are from quite a long list of animal types (dog, horse, sheep, dinosaur, unicorn, and lots more), and each part fits a certain body position (head, tail, torso, front leg, back leg). You can stick parts where they don’t belong, but some with some combinations your animal will not be able to move (swapping head/tail or different legs is fine, using a head for a leg does not work). From the pulled parts you can assemble an animal, and then place it into a themed world (like Savannah, woods, winter). You can visit them in the world and observe them, feed them various foods, and that’s already most of the gameplay.
There is a currency called “heart points”, which is required to get more parts from the puppet slot machine. You can get heart points by feeding the animals in their worlds, by selling them to the local pet store (😢), or just by talking to people in town. There are also other things to spend your heart points on, the largest being the “Volunteer Association”, which kinda seems like a religious cult (but more about that later).
The game’s town has various locations to visit that let you do things that would usually go into an “extras” menu, like listening to animal sounds, or (re-)watching cutscenes. There’s also a bank that lets you stash your puppets, and the closed zoo, which offers the most game-like objective. You can give your puppets to the zoo, and after it has enough animals, it will open back up, which gives you a very cute cutscene where you take a tour through the zoo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_qmMH4OjKo
The game weirdly combines very different tones, jumping between realistic, child-appropriately colorful, and modern internet creepypasta. The opening cutscene, some of the other CGI animal videos, the look of the animal worlds, and the gallery of animal noises give the impression of some kind of educational software for children. The town itself and its buildings, the characters and their cutesy dialogue, and some of the cutscenes are very colorful, like a children’s toy, although they often already lean towards unhinged or even creepy. Check out these animations that play when you take a transport to the “factory” where puppets are assembled, or to the worlds where the animal puppets are placed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBpikGsLU-4
And then there’s the creepy part. One of the buildings in town is for the “Volunteer Association”, a bunch of expressionless people that say phrases like “Devotion to your duty will save the world”, giving a strong appearance of some kind of religious cult. You can donate heart points to them, and after donating enough, they will just be gone when you come back later. The last member that stayed behind will tell you that they have “moved”, and that’s the end of that. As far as I can tell, there is no further outcome to this “quest line”.
The creepy aspect becomes very explicit in one very hidden part of the game. I didn’t see any of this when I played it, but found a post about it when researching the game later. When looking at the icon and text for the save slot on the memory card, a little story about your little alien pal Pilomy will be told, progressing as you repeatedly save your game progress: “in a crisis”, “Pilomy in pursuit”, “Determination with three hairs”, “Fight to the death”, “Pilomy running out of power”, “The 100th escape and the first time”. It seems like the relationship with our child protagonist might not be quite as happy as it is shown in the game, but the game never reveals any more about this. Even the manual, which has a little prologue story about Pilomy, never reveals anything of this dark side of the game. Here’s the blog post I found about these save slot messages:
https://vidyasaur.medium.com/the-disturbing-secret-in-puppet-zoo-pilomy-5d0d077b5300
After creating enough puppet animals (at least I assume that’s the criteria), the cutscene cinema in town will have a new video called “Pilomy and friends”, which is the game’s ending and credits, and that’s it. You can still make more puppets, put them in worlds and so on, but there’s nothing new to be found, as far as I could tell.
Puppet Zoo Pilomy gave me the impression that there is more to it, something more waiting under the surface for you to unlock, but nothing really came of it. In the end it’s one of those toy sandboxes that lets you mess around a bit, and it is interesting to look at with its strange vibes, but without any major gameplay elements and no real depth to its sandbox, the novelty will wear off quickly.
Here’s my playthrough of the game, building a bunch of creatures and observing their majesty:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW2UABlWoeQ