In a tale as old as laminate flooring, a mischievous puppy discovers the joy in shaking off mud in their owner’s brand new, freshly cleaned, home. This naughtiness doesn’t end with just a few muddy footprints on the kitchen floor, however. While their doting owner is asleep, our Pomeranian pal sets about coating the entire house in mud, paint, coffee, and whatever else they can find. The joke of course being that Pomme, as they’re known, is as cute as can be.
Developed by Bandai Namco, Doronko Wanko (which roughly translates to ‘Muddy Puppy’ in English) made its debut on PC as a free to play release with a handful of additional puppies to purchase. This new Switch version costs just over £4 and includes all the extra breeds – including a toy poodle and a Jack Russell terrier. It’s worth noting that like the PC version it boots straight into a Japanese menu, requiring a few button presses to navigate to the options screen and change the language setting. This means anyone looking to download this for a younger gamer may have fiddle for a few minutues (or use an online guide) before the destruction can begin.
Doronko Wanko is based around completing two goals which can be worked towards simutanously. The first is to explore the house fully, rolling in various coloured fluids and shaking it off as you go, in order to reveal twelve stickers. This task can be as simple as entering a new room and shaking mud onto the floor, to requiring a couple of steps such as turning on a fan and shaking off in front of it – an idea so delightfully messy that’s its reused twice. Once all twelve stickers are found the door to an additional room opens, unlocking the ending. While you’re free to cause carnage at your own pace, this goal can be completed in under an hour – although there’s every chance that the final sticker needed will become overlooked, requiring a backtrack across all three floors.
The second goal is more time consuming, helping to bring the game’s runtime to around two hours. Every room has a list of challenges to complete to unlock a medal, with progress charted on the menu. The challenge names alone give a good idea of what’s required, and as you may have guessed, most involve making a mess in some way: spray the TV with mud, drip paint on a canvas, clog the sink, etc. It seems reasonable to suggest that the majority of challenges will be unlocked while sticker hunting, with little extra thought needed.
Reducing the difficutly further is the presence of unlockable hats, gained by achieving monetary destruction milestones, some of which spray paint automatically. In fact, the most challenging thing here is the quest to find a missing toy train’s wheels, calling for light exploration.
Once the sticker quest is complete, you’re able to return to a fresh home so that you can continue ticking off challenges, with everything unlocked so far lined-up in the kitchen.
Visually it looks pretty, well, tidy. Perhaps not the best description for something based around making a mess, I know. The paint splattering tech is neat (think Splatoon), and the physics engine largely behaves itself. Not everything is shipshape, sadly. I played on a Switch Lite and found that some smaller details were hard to see, such as Pomme’s facial expressions when using emojis. When the house is fully trashed the framerate starts to nosedive too, especially when heading into the wine cellar to spill some claret. One cut-scene here was akin to a slideshow due to featuring dozens of wine bottles breaking at once. I’d imagine that these issues aren’t as prevalent on Switch 2.
With half-term upon us, Doronko Wanko is ideal for anyone looking for an inexpensive way to keep the kids amused for a few hours – and the new ability to switch pups helps give it a Nintendogs vibe, giving the chance to choose your vessel of destruction. But despite having some similarities – like taking a single idea and (literally) rolling with it from start to finish – it certainly isn’t the next Katamari Damacy. Think of it more like a loveable family dog in their playful puppy years, in the sense that the fun, cuteness and chaos won’t last for long.
Bandai Namco’s Doronko Wanko is out now on Switch. Published by Phoenixx. The PC version launched on Steam in 2024.