šššš (4/5 Space Dogs) One dog deducted because the inventory system still eats your lighter fluid every time. Have you played the new build? Did you pet the Rust-Hound or run from it? Let me know in the commentsājust donāt type the starās true name. Weāve agreed not to do that anymore. Find more from DogFactory at [their itch.io page] (assuming it exists, or will exist, or has always existed).
Iām talking, of course, about , specifically the latest build: v2024-12-29 , released by the enigmatic creator known only as DogFactory .
4 minutes
If youāve been anywhere near the indie interactive fiction or cult narrative game spaces lately, youāve probably heard the howl. Itās low, resonant, and carries a strange metallic echoālike a hunting horn mixed with a dial-up modem.
Chasing the Storm: A Deep Dive into Hounds of the Meteor (v2024-12-29) by DogFactory
DogFactory has slipped in a new meta-narrative layer. Occasionally, the game will pause and ask: āAre you still chasing, or have you been caught?ā If you type āhelp,ā the game responds with a short ASCII art of a dog sitting in front of a terminal. Itās unnerving, sweet, and deeply weird all at once. The Vibe: A Symphony of Static and Fur What makes Hounds of the Meteor stick with you is its tone. Imagine Sunless Sea had a baby with Northern Exposure , and that baby was raised by House of Leaves and a very lonely golden retriever.
The gameās signature mechanic is the āEmpathy Protocolāāa slider that lets you interpret the starās signals as either , lamentations , or courtship calls . Your choice literally rewrites the shipās logs, the crewās dialogue, and even the layout of the corridors. Whatās New in v2024-12-29? This isnāt a simple bug-fix patch. DogFactory has effectively released a directorās cut that changes the gameās emotional core. Here are the headline features:
Iāve spent the last week clawing through this update, and I need to talk about it. For the uninitiated, Hounds of the Meteor is a parser-driven, text-based horror-romance (yes, you read that right) set aboard a failing deep-space research vessel. You play as a disgraced signal analyst assigned to a dying star designated āThe Meteor.ā Your job? Decode the psychic howls emanating from its accretion disk. The twist? Those howls are answering back .
January 6, 2025
So boot it up. Turn down the lights. And when the console asks āAre you still there?ā ā donāt lie.