• Price: $19.99 USD (currently on sale for $15.99 until June 9th)
• Developer: Little Rock Games
• Publisher: Freedom Games
• Release Date: May 25, 2023

A review code was kindly provided by Stride PR on behalf of Little Rock Games and Freedom Games. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

I’ve been the lucky human of multiple cats and dogs over the past two decades. My family has adopted a couple of our pets from rescues, but most of them came from shelters. Conditions at those shelters varied, but it seems that a common theme is overcrowding and a lack of resources. I really appreciate the people who work to get these precious animals adopted, and I liked the idea of To The Rescue!, a game that allows you to manage a dog shelter and help them find their “fur-ever” homes. 🥰

Before I got started, I adjusted the difficulty of the game in settings. You can change how fast time goes by, how fast diseases spread in the shelter, the difficulty of getting visitors to adopt, and the fees the shelter has to pay. You can also make the mini games easier/simpler. And I am beyond thankful that they also include the ability to send dogs away to other shelters instead of euthanasia when your shelter is full. 🙏🏻🥺

There are two different modes: quick mode and story mode. (Quick mode seems like it has more explicit explanations on how running the shelter works.) When you start a new game, you’re given 5 preset character appearances (male and female), and you can name your character. Then you can choose a companion dog from 37 options and name them too!

In story mode, your character has just moved to the town where they adopted their dog. You end up working at a local shelter for a few days when suddenly, the mayor comes in and asks you to manage the town’s newly built shelter. She says that this job will be a trial run of 8 weeks, and then they’ll see how you did. She’ll give you several challenges to help the shelter grow – stuff like increasing your reputation or keeping the dogs’ welfare percentage up.

At first, running the shelter can be a bit overwhelming because you’re the only one working there. Dogs appear inside of the large holding area and remain there until you place them in a kennel of their own. Most of the time you only have individual dogs show up, but on occasion a litter of puppies arrives for you to wrangle. You need to get them all in a kennel quickly because they oddly do not have access to food or drink in the holding area.

Each dog has a preferred type of food, and there are four different kinds for them to choose from. Apparently, giving them their preferred food slows down the rate at which they make waste in their kennel and get it dirty. You’ll be alerted when a dog is hungry, thirsty, or dirty. If the dogs’ needs aren’t met and they reach neglected status, the shelter will be fined!

It can be difficult keeping all of the dogs fed and watered in clean kennels by yourself. (Dirty dogs have to be bathed!) I ended up putting all 4 types of food, the filled water bucket, and the scooper closer to the kennels on the floor for convenience. You sadly don’t get to choose where to put the show kennels, supply room, medical room, or even where things like food dispensers are located on the wall. This makes it somewhat difficult to place new doors to connect to the rooms you add to the shelter.

The shelter starts out with only one small kennel room, and you’ll have to go to the computer to buy more space for new kennel rooms and play spaces. I found the controls for construction to be really awkward. When you select something you want built, instead of pressing A to place it you press ZR.

At one point I needed to demolish the wooden kennels to replace them with better ones, and when I tried to delete something it would have the cursor on the menu for the items you can build and not delete anything. I believe I had to move the cursor down to checkout to get items to delete properly.

Another issue was that you need to press X to “inspect” the blueprints and move the cursor over to buy more land. It took me a while to figure this out, and it would have been much simpler to scroll over like normal and use A to confirm instead of complicating the controls with so many buttons. I also couldn’t figure out how to use the wallpaper and flooring options I supposedly unlocked.

I did eventually figure out how to manage construction with some trial and error. More and more dogs will appear in the holding area when you have enough space for them after building new kennels. Once you build break rooms you can start hiring employees to help you with the increased workload. Every day you earn skill points that allow you to unlock things like adding more employees, PR skills that allow you to persuade uncertain adopters, or better quality kennels that can hold more than one dog.

Some dogs can share a kennel with others (if they eat the same type of food), but the ones with negative traits can’t; I had a few fights break out before I realized I’d placed incompatible dogs together by accident. I then had to take them to the medical room to treat them. Other dogs will arrive at the shelter already injured or sick. You need to heal them before they end up at “neglected” status.

The shelter has a rating scale from -100 to 100; a negative reputation means that the community has lost trust in the shelter. You can lose reputation points by treating dogs poorly or through dishonesty. (I never figured out how you could be “dishonest” though.) Adopting out a lot of dogs will increase your reputation. There are also events that you can go to to earn additional donations or get some dogs adopted.

Potential adopters slowly trickle into the shelter every day. Some of them will give you specific traits that they want in a dog, such as breed, size, age, good with cats/dogs, etc. But many of them come in and just say they want a dog. You can go to the computer and sort the dogs by different categories to quickly find some that may match the adopter’s criteria.

As soon as you’ve determined which dogs you want to show them, you can grab a ribbon that conveniently transports dogs right to the show kennels instead of making you struggle to bring a bunch of them over on a leash. You can only bring five dogs to the show kennels, so choose wisely. Every adopter has some amount of resistance towards adopting.

The more dogs they see, the more willing they are to adopt (so sad for the ones who aren’t adopted!). Changing the settings can make it so that each dog you show adds even more to the adopter’s willingness meter. You can also try to persuade them to take a dog home by offering a discounted adoption fee. It can take a while for the adopter to examine each dog, but thankfully they added a skip function and you can go straight to them telling you which dog they want.

I loved helping dogs find homes – especially those who were in my shelter longer. However, the experience feels like it’s missing some things; in story mode the Mayor ran out of tasks for me about halfway through the 8 week trial period. I also wanted to add dog beds and toys to the kennels, and customize the shelter’s appearance more. (I understand that real shelters may not have the resources for that, but it would have been a nice addition in terms of gameplay.) It could have been fun to use a limited amount of hats and backdrops to advertise the dogs for adoption on the game’s pre-existing (fictional) social media function.

There are also a lot of technical issues:

• My game crashed at least a dozen times, which is unfortunate because there isn’t a manual save option (it auto saves at the beginning of each day).
• I also ended up getting stuck behind the food dispensers a few times, and the “unstuck” button on the pause menu didn’t always work.
• Sometimes dogs will indicate that they’re hungry or thirsty even though they have their preferred food and water in their kennel.
• The leash got stuck in “active status” several times, and I couldn’t pick anything up. I had to close the game completely to fix it. Eventually I figured out that I’d been pressing into my left joystick, which keeps the leash out…
• The same characters kept coming to the shelter with the same dialogue (like the reporter).
• The notifications on the side of screen were too subtle for me, and needed to be more apparent because I didn’t notice them until I was several weeks in.

I think that once they straighten out its technical issues, To The Rescue! will be a decent simulation game for players. The dogs are adorable and I think it’s great that this makes us all think about our local shelters’ situations more. It’s a realistic look at the way animal shelters operate. I’d love to see a game focused on cats next! 🐈‍⬛