Dead Pets: A Punk Rock Slice of Life Sim review: Bojack Horseman goes punk rock

Dead Pets digs into the unglamorous side of rock and roll

Let me tell you: Being in a band ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sure, you get to live the life of a rockstar anytime you’re on stage, but that’s only one small piece of the gig. If you want to record a proper album in a studio, it’s going to cost you thousands of dollars. That’s before factoring in the cost for cover art, merch, and promotional materials. You’re bound to do battle with shady bookers who spring surprise room fees on you even if you sell a good number of tickets to your shows. And that’s honestly the least of your worries when it comes to predatory music industry creeps. Being in a band rocks, but it also sucks sometimes.

Where so much media about music can’t help but romanticize the dive-bar band, Dead Pets: A Punk Rock Slice of Life Sim sets more realistic expectations. Developed by Triple Topping, and narrowly salvaged from cancellation by publisher Akupara Games, Dead Pets tells the story of a small band struggling to break through despite all the forces in the world working against them. While its rhythm game interludes could have used a good tune-up, it’s an honest little story about the sometimes mundane lives of struggling artists.

Dead Pets centers around Gordy, a demon who is also a guitarist in a punk band (the titular Dead Pets). Triple Topping isn’t out to tell an over-the-top rags-to-riches story; it’s more so a rags-to-more-rags-to-maybe-less-rags-eventually story. Gordy and her monster bandmates are focused on playing some loose gigs at dingy bars, recording an EP, and maybe making it onto a festival stage one day. Those aren’t huge ambitions on paper, but they are for a ragtag group of musicians who are dead broke at all times.

It’s more of a financial comedy than a glamorous musical. The story is split up into chapters, each one spanning four days. During that time, Gordy has to balance her dedication to the band with her responsibilities outside of it. Paying rent on time, keeping the electricity on, covering her gynecologist bills — it’s a lot to manage when you’re also trying to raise money to record an EP. The juggling act plays out in a straightforward narrative adventure where Gordy jumps between locations each day, makes dialogue choices that impact her social stats, and tries to earn money at her day job in a hectic Diner Dash-style minigame.

Tonally, Dead Pets draws inspiration from shows like BoJack Horseman. It’s a comedy, but one that can get sobering in its darker moments: An early scene prefaced by a content warning revolves around an implied sexual assault that is a source of anxiety through the story. Triple Topping doesn’t fully nail the tone. The writing can be heavy-handed and the jokes never quite take advantage of the demon world setting in the way BoJack or Tuca & Bertie do so well with their cities of anthropomorphized animals. But it at least nails it on the visual front, setting everything in a trashy world that looks like a DIY flier for a punk show come to life.

Dead Pets works best at the intersection between the wild and the mundane. The dull moments of Gordy’s life are often represented as clever minigames. When she gets her period, players have to bounce eggs around the inside of a uterus like a pinball machine. There’s a tampon-catching minigame, a demonic flossing sequence, and more jolts of interactivity that keep Dead Pets playful between its dialogue sequences.

Ironically, the one area where it stumbles is in its music minigames. A few times each chapter, the band gets together to practice, perform, or record a song. That plays out as a two-button rhythm minigame. It’s serviceable, letting players tap along to some original songs recorded in the style of riot grrrl greats like Bikini Kill, but there are no real stakes to failing and the music doesn’t really match up with a clear rhythm. (Curiously, both are recurring problems I’ve found in several recent indie rhythm games, including Goodbye Volcano High and Unbeatable.) Weirdest of all, Dead Pets only features a few songs, which players redo several times throughout the story. A bonus jukebox mode at least gets more use out of the minigame by adding in music from other Akupara games, like Cabernet and Cryptmaster.

Part of me wonders if it's an intentional joke. The reality of being in a band is that you play the same songs a lot. You practice them until your fingers bleed and then play them for years — sometimes decades! — at live shows. It’s one of the unglamorous realities of punk rock, and Dead Pets is nothing if not committed to those moments.

But Dead Pets’ intention is not to dissuade anyone from following their indie rock dreams. Like Gordy, it is wholly committed to the punk ethos. Even when its characters grapple with adulthood, like getting a desk job or starting a family amid the chaos of managing a band, it still speaks the language of rebellion. It’s a loud and proud work of feminist art that revels in a bit of playful misandry. As a female artist, Gordy has to claw her way into a space dominated by manipulative men trying to take advantage of her and other marginalized artists. She keeps fighting that fight because she believes in her music, and she wants to create a more welcoming space for people like her to rage against the machine.

Yeah, it’s a drag sometimes. The bills stack up, the music gets old, and the fun parts start to look like work after a while. But goddamnit, you can’t keep a riot grrrl down.

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Dead Pets: A Punk Rock Slice of Life Sim is out now on Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Steam Deck using a prerelease download code provided by Akupara Games. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.