![]() ![]() Under this omen, you essentially warg, Game of Thrones-style, into your chosen creature and attempt to survive and thrive in a flurry of feeding, mating and fleeing. You always start bang in the middle, in the relatively placid environs of Shibuya Station beneath a building whose upper facade appropriately resembles a cage mangled by an escaping animal. This newly fecund Tokyo is more a linearly linked series of overgrown city blocks that, when you toggle to the map screen, resemble a loosely-grouped assemblage of levels from a Double Dragon-style side-scrolling beat-em-up. Geographically, this isn't an obsessively detailed recreation like Yakuza's peerless, crammed Kamurocho district. With its emphasis on Pomeranians, Beagles, Golden Retrievers and stately Tosas, it initially feels rather like Crufts meets I Am Legend. From household pets to common livestock, zoo exotics to unexpected Jurassic comebacks, Tokyo is now emphatically an animal kingdom where only the strongest survive. Over time, some insistent flora has crept back in, and so, in turn, has the fauna. It's set in an eerily abandoned Tokyo a decade after humankind has mysteriously vanished. But five years on and its inherent strangeness has ripened into something rather sweet. It stubbornly sticks to its own bizarre and rather obstructionist logic and demands the player essentially fit in around it, a sensation presumably familiar to cat owners. Tokyo Jungle simply isn't one of those games prepared to meet you halfway. One wolf against three tigers, on the other hand… Get the hang of Tokyo Jungle's stealthy sneak attack and even a tiny lap dog can take down a zebra. ![]() Every now and then that cute pup would remind me of the existence of Tokyo Jungle, and make me idly wonder: how much is that doggo in the window? A few weeks ago, when the game was bundled in with July's PlayStation Plus offerings, the answer was: free, to a good home. Rather unexpectedly, it carved a groove in my memory due to its distinctive game icon - a proud little Pomeranian lap dog - an image that would cheerily recur on my friend's PS3 XMB while he was spooling through his haul of downloaded games. Depending on who you talked to, it was either too weird, or too basic, or somehow both of those things simultaneously. Developed by Japanese studio Crispy's, it was a PlayStation 3 exclusive that ruffled a few feathers but did not seem to leave much of a cultural paw-print. ![]() Does the world seem just a little bit closer to apocalypse now than it did five years ago? Perhaps that's why I recently became so obsessed with Tokyo Jungle, the beastly post-cataclysm survival sim that on its initial release in 2012 was generally viewed as an idiosyncratic throwback rather than a giant evolutionary leap forward. ![]()
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