
Street Dog Legend
Street Dog Legend is a surprisingly fun game, way more entertaining than its Steam page or its, uh… unique artwork might lead you to believe. It’s a simple hot dog simulator where you play as Tony Dogger – a regular guy with an ambitious dream of building a hot dog empire, one bun at a time. Over the course of 28 story-driven days, you’ll prepare and serve hot dogs to customers, earning coins with each successful order. These earnings can be invested into upgrading your tools, boosting cooking speed, preventing burnt sausages or unlocking new locations. You can also expand your menu by offering toppings, chips, and sodas to increase your profits and keep your customers happy.
What really won me over wasn’t just the chill, addictive gameplay. It was the satirical writing of Street Dog Legend. A lot of narrative-driven games (even some big-budget AAA ones) love to brag about meaningful choices, only to deliver a few tweaked dialogue lines and a slightly different ending slide. On the contrary, in Street Dog Legend your choices shape the story in noticeable ways, and the game can play out differently depending on the path you take, even though the core gameplay will remain the same: serving hot dogs.
Tony Dogger is caught in the middle of a war between the city government, determined to control the pest population, and a secretive faction of rats who claim to want to coexist peacefully with the townspeople (by eliminating anyone who disagrees, obviously). Both sides try to recruit Tony as their personal hitman and the decisions you make influence which events unfold by choosing who to kill with poisoned hot dogs and who to let live. Siding with the rats, for example, will allow you to unlock a set of perks to automate refilling your stock or cooking the buns and the sausages. Of course, you can also choose to reject both factions and go on your own morally questionable path, deciding who deserves to be served a deadly poisoned hot dog or not.
One thing that I liked about the game is the degree of flexibility that it offers to the player. The progression is not gated behind upgrading your tools or expanding your business. At any point in time, you can choose to refund all purchased upgrades, simplifying your gameplay a lot. You can settle on preparing only basic orders, which will increase the number of customers you can handle in one day. Or, you can add toppings and extras for bigger, more expensive orders but fewer customers to process. Unfortunately, what you cannot do is manually save and load the game to potentially explore how a different choice unfolds. There is also no option to replay or restart the current day (aside from force-quitting the game in the middle of it).
Obviously, Street Dog Legend is far from being a stellar game. But it’s passable and for the modest price of $4, it offers a decent amount of content. Aside from the story mode that branches out into five different endings (each requiring a new playthrough that takes ~2h on average), a free-play mode where you can customize your goals for that playthrough (money / upgrades earned, or both of these) also exists. A few extra arcade minigames are already included, and the devs have a large set of updates planned to be released in the near future. The game also features Steam-integrated achievements of which several are mutually exclusive and a few others are missable.