So what if dominoes was an art deco dungeon crawling roguelike deck-building puzzle game?

You’ve inherited a fortune from your great uncle, but only if you’re able to reach room 46 of his 45 room house. Getting to the room involves solving logic and cryptic puzzles, realising that random items in each room might actually be important clues, and putting together hidden messages and objects to understand your family’s past and the reason the house is so weird.

The weirdness of the house comes about from the fact that each day, it is emptied of all the rooms. Each door you open requires you to draft the room that will appear on the other side of it, and you can choose from three randomly chosen rooms from a larger deck each time.

Rooms have different purposes, with different door layouts, so it’s possible to dead-end yourself and that’s where the roguelike bit of the game comes in – you call it a day and start afresh tomorrow. The house layout resets, you lose all the items you’ve collected, and you give it another go. You can also end a day if you run out of steps – you only start with so many and each room you enter (or re-enter, so backtracking is penalised) uses one up. Food you find and sometimes drafting bedrooms can boost your number of steps, though.

As you play, you find a few things which do persist between days, like being able to start with some money – which you can use to buy things in some rooms – or gems – which you mainly use to draft rarer or more powerful rooms. You can also open up permanent shortcuts and boons, and start with more steps.

I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that you’re at the mercy of the random number generator in order to progress, but that’s no different to Rogue, really. Most runs have you finding something new, like a bit of story, a secret, a clue, a new room in your room pool or a permanent bonus of some kind so even failed runs usually have some progression. For example, you may find a safe combination but then fail to get the room with the safe in it on the same run, but your knowledge of the combination carries over.

It’s smart, weird, occasionally cruel, but always intriguing. And who wouldn’t want to explore a reassembling, randomly generated family mansion full of secrets and puzzles, one failed day at a time?

One good thing about PS++++++++++, is that in amongst all the crap games and shovelware there are a load of co-op games that are fun for me to play with my daughter. It’s because of an afternoon where we were looking for something to play together that we were trawling through the library and spotted Phogs (or possibly “PHOGS!”), and now we’ve completed it.

In many ways, this game falls into a similar category as other wonky-physics titles like Human Fall Flat and Totally Reliable Delivery Service, in that you have inaccurate control over a character and have to manipulate objects in the environment in order to progress. An additional hinderance here, however, is that each player controls either end of a double-ended dog. Imagine a sausage dog with a head at each end, Push-Me-Pull-You style, with each independently moved by each player. You can make things cosy by sharing a single controller and having a stick each, but we were fine to go with a pad apiece.

Anyway. That’s all logistics waffle – what about the game?

It’s a sort of platformy-puzzley game, where your phog has to reach a big snake at the end of each level who swallows you and moves you on to the next. In the way are gaps you have to fill, plants you have to water, items you have to collect, water spouts you have to plug, and dark areas you have to light up (or vice versa). Mostly, these are achieved by grabbing something with one or both of your phog heads. For example, there’s a watermelon patch that needs watering so the watermelon can grow and create a platform for you to progress. Nearby is a pipe with water coming out. You grab on to the pipe with one phogmouth and then the other phogmouth becomes a hose, and – since you can also stretch your phog – you can use this to reach the patch and water the watermelon.

Cooperation is absolutely key, as you can imagine, especially on the many “swing over this gap” sections, where you can grab hold of a hook (or something) with one phoghead then swing the other phoghead to the next hook and grab hold, repeating until you’ve swung all the way over. Timing is often critical so we found ourselves counting to three a lot. Thankfully, you can’t really die and if you fall off the world (which is inevitable give the wonky physics and lack of coordination) you don’t lose much progress at all.

It’s not a very long game, with us finishing it in about three hours, but we enjoyed it and the silly hats you can unlock (which do nothing except adorn a head). There’s a fair amount of variety across the four main worlds, with bosses of a sort on each. The “night and day” world has some especially clever light-and-dark, awake-and-asleep and perspective puzzles and events. The final world also has a short section where there’s a big change to the game mechanics, although I won’t spoil it. Oh, and eating all the food you find so you get phat phogs never gets old or boring.

It’s nice and colourful and mostly low stress (unlike, say, Overcooked), and we didn’t end up fighting each other or anything so that’s probably a recommendation?