This game tugs at your heart the way a puppy with sad eyes might. Purrfect Pet Shop is a cute and colorful service game that lets you take care of an animal adoption center. The story is simple and fits well with the game’s setting: your nana wants to take a vacation and is entrusting either grandchild Peter or Sofia (you choose at the start of the game - points for gender equality!) with the job. Nurse stray animals back to health, match them with the right owners, and everyone goes home happy. You’ll also be asked to create the pet of your dreams, and it’s quite thorough: you customize the name, size, fur, eye color, and marks (like spots or stripes). You can’t choose the exact dog or cat type - but then again, this ain’t the Sims.

The gameplay is both Purrfect Pet Shop’s strength and weakness. Customers look for 4 particular traits: type of animal, size, fur length, and color, but only one trait is immediately visible. You have to click on question marks to discover the other traits, but this takes too much time and can cause you to lose a level. So much of your game will be trial and error - from just one or two clues, you need to figure out what your pet-loving customers want, and fast. If you’re half-right, they’ll say, “Almost”. Sometimes it’s also unclear what you’ve selected, leading to a lot of wrong clicks.

The added game modes are good ideas but can also get awkward. There’s a mini-game where you play with your customized pet, but it’s not immediately clear that you need to queue a series of correct actions in order to make him or her happy. In between stages, you can use your hard-earned cash or “hearts” (which you earn by taking care of your custom pet) to buy upgrades, but in the early levels you won’t be able to afford anything. Lastly, there is a Pet Photo Shoot mode that lets you take pictures of your pet and e-mail them, but chances are you’ll be spending most of your time playing the actual game.

Little things like these make us feel that Purrfect Pet Shop is not so perfect - but it does have promise. If you want to play a different kind of service game, this is the one for you. Besides, the pets are really cute. Who can resist?

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(4 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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