Years ago - and I mean years, like, when I was in my early twenties (I am now 36) - I was fairly well known for ripping games the fuck apart. In fact, when I used to write for a now defunct gaming website, a job which paid me for the record, one of my pieces was so scathing that it wound up leading to me being the number one read person on the site by and large for the remainder of their time online.

These days I'm fairly low key. As stuff like early access has become more prominant, allowing indie developers time to hone their work while getting feedback on what they have accomplished, I've become a lot more willing to let bygones be bygones, especially for people who produced stuff in either a small team or entirely by themselves. The same can't be said for major studios, though even then I'd consider myself a person who generally thinks most hate I see is completely unwarranted (a recent example is people complaining that the new Fable is doing away with the aspect of morality altering your appearance, for some reason calling it the best aspect when in fact it was always the worst. After all, what's the point of character customization if your acts in the game can undo all of that?).

But recently a title has pissed me off so much in the lastyy 74 minutes of playing it that I cannot hold back my ire any longer.

We need to talk about Zoochosis.

Yes yes I know, so many people have already run the gamut, but I have a personal vendetta. This game, while having an incredible premise of a zoo simulator combined with horror aspects and animal mutations ala Carpenter's "The Thing", is probably one of the coolest goddamn concepts I've ever seen, regardless of medium. And while strides have clearly been made to bring what was once simply trailer bait up to snuff in terms of comparison to its own gameplay, there's still one glaring issue and that is the game is outright goddamn broken for people with disabilities. I was diagnosed in middle school with Dyscalculia, which is a math learning disorder. I am a 36 year old woman and I cannot do anything beyond basic addition and subtraction. And while mine is a fairly severe example, my argument stands I think.

In the game, you are presented with a myriad of tasks to help take care of the animals on your overnight shift, one of these tasks being feeding them. The way you do this is by taking blocks of food - herbal, vegetable, fish and on occasion meat - and cutting them up into the appropriately sized portions for the animal that requires said block. For this example, I will use fish, as that's what I was trying to do for the Penguins. I took the fish blocks to the train, and I got into the preparation menu. The problem is, for whatever goddamn reason, this game decided "You know what, fuck anyone who doesn't know any kind of math, we're not gonna make an easy number that can be followed, you need a goddamn calculus degree in order to do something this mundane." And while people make the completely biased argument to simply use a calculator, showing their true colors in regards to people with disorders, that argument is flawed for many reasons.

First of all, I don't know about you, but I typically don't have to use a goddamn Texas Instrument to feed my fucking dogs on a daily basis, okay?

But secondly, this doesn't work, and I know it doesn't work because I've TRIED it. The game makes you divide things into halves or halves of halves, and guess what, not only is that incredibly difficult to do on a digital calculator on your computer - if not outright impossible - but it also just still doesn't work. The game still calls it the wrong size. So the game is demanding a portion you cannot measure, and then, by some grace of god you get it right by eyeballing it, you're still wrong. Fuck the player, I guess, is their business motto.

I don't know, man. This sucks. It's one thing for a game to be criticized for aspects such as its gameplay, its presentation, etc, but it's a whole other thing for a game to be criticized for opting to utilize a mechanic in such a way that it flat out didn't have to, and thusly locking itself off from people who would otherwise love it if it was playable. They literally could've just put a line on the brick to indicate how much was okay to cut off. It could've been that simple. Instead, you need a fucking Harvard math degree.

So sure, include me in the group of people wildly pissed off about this title, even with its various improvements in other areas, but I'm definitely not pissed off for the same reasons they are. At this point I'd rather let the mutated animals eat me than try to do math.

Fuck this.

I am about to head to bed but wanted to give an update:

• playthroughs are short. For $20 bucks it can be a turn on or a turn off. I honestly don't mind since it allows for replayability with different ending and to unlock different enclosures.
• AI is a bit easy to understand (whenever you go to give feed or any of the likes, you can count 100% that one animal has mutated but I would expect it considering things).
• I like the voice acting and the story. It's simple and intuitive.
• Graphics are okay. Buggy but nothing too breaking in my playthroughs so far.
• Obviously, the teaser trailers were built for hype. The release and gameplay trailers (which were available before launch) are a good reflection of what to expect.
• You play the role of a 'zookeeper' and you need to rescue the animals (something a lot of people missed in the trailers is that little tidbit and the fact that some animals look pacific to you, so no, it's not a shoot em' up with zomboid eldritch horrors) by administering the right medicine to them. If you fail, more animals die. You can however kill infected animals.
• You can get softlocked if you run out of elements to make a cure. So far it hasn't been the worse case scenario but I'd like the devs to fix that.
• You get thrown in a little bit in the rough after the tutorial and the tutorial doesn't explain everything. It's a bit of trial an error but I don't mind.

People on Steam are dumping negative reviews because they seemingly expected a shoot 'em up where you kill the infected animals (not, y'know save them like from the trailer 8 months ago...), an endless mode Theme Hospital with animals or something in the ballpark of "jumpscares galore".

I would ask these people to temper their expectations for a game coming from the developers of only two other games, both of which are free and titled Sparky Marky... If you like horrors, wait until they fix the majority of bugs and give it a whirl.

"The ads mislead me so hard" - in the trailers the zookeeper doesn't even have a gun... Disappointed by people more than the game.