Sadly, the creative director, story writer and probably the dude with the original idea, all one person by the way, died halfway through the game's development. They finished the game on their own, releasing it as a homage to him. I still think it's not really worth the price, but hell, I can't hate it too much. You can feel the quality shift as the game progresses, along with the abrupt ending, over reliance on newgame+, due to them losing the man at the helm of it all. I def did expect more, due to the trailer, but Death itself prevented that trailer from becoming reality.
Not to sound like I disrespect the creative director. But are we sure that he would have made the game different? It's possible that they are relying on people thinking the game is just bad because the genius behind it is dead rather than the game just being bad.
Im still not over how the protag decides to give his wife and kid animal feed to eat, then the wife actually cooks it, then she gives it to not only her kid but neighbors???? Even the insane scientist boss gets shocked by this
Seeing some of the food going to waste for seemingly no reason and deciding to knick it would have been fine. An animal not eating all of its portion or something because it’s sick. If you’re poor you’re willing to eat slop and wouldn’t want to see food going to waste. The food being labeled as “gourmet” cuts or something and wondering why these animals are getting such good food while you’re starving. But just Taking It being your FIRST COURSE OF ACTION is fucking craaaaazy. All of those half thought up things would have also really stressed the idea you’re fucking desperate and stuff too. Instead the guy just seems kinda stupid - no wonder he can’t get a fucking job if he’s willing to steal so effortlessly and quickly.
@@brendenhawley2225 You also have the choice to just not give it to her at all, but IIRC that requires you ignore your wife entirely at the start. Even then, the fact that it’s an option at all is crazy.
@@electricbayonet2 That I think actually makes sense. The guy went for the job because he was so poor he could not even afford decent food. Which is why he went for the zoo meat. Had the guy been making ends meat, he would of not sent the meat or got the job in the first place.
Honestly I was hyped for the idea of a Zoo simulator/management game mixed with horror elements. Like actually being able to go around the zoo, tend to animals, let visitors in in the day time, etc. while also fending off the parasites that turn your animals. It would've been super fun and sick as hell but nah. We got uhh, linear plot that makes no sense.
Someone I watched play it tried to play it like an actual zoo keeper, trying to bond with the animals and getting genuinely upset when they died/were sick. And then it didn't really matter because the game doesn't reward you for saving them, if anything, it punishes you. Kind of ruined the point of having it set in a zoo imo
One of my favorite little things (not any major issue, just something I found kinda funny) is that all the marketing really hyped up the mutant giraffe as, like, the "main" monster. All the posters and trailers and even the steam thumbnail all prominently feature the mutant giraffe. It's basically the game's mascot. And in the actual game, the giraffe enclosure is the tutorial. Meaning that it's basically guaranteed they won't mutate during your first playthrough.
@@ShadowsAndScience right? Really hyped it up for not even being that big of a deal. The fact i only saw 2 infected animals in my first playthrough is actually embarrassing
Maybe leaning into the parasites won’t harm each other reasoning would have worked to make it unsettling? Like Paul can’t poison the mother, he can’t kill the animals, he can’t even cure them because he’s infected too and can’t act on his own accord
@@SocksNeedsHelpI think they meant as a suggestion to change, not current gameplay. Making it so that Paul can't cure them or kill them, not that he can't currently.
@@xxsharkloverxx Seconding. OP's intent was that the game should have included Paul being unable to cure or kill the parasites as a lore element. I guess this would have prompted a need for a different game mechanic though, like some kind of parasite tranquillisers rather than "cures".
@5H4RKU8US i guess but i mean, paul isnt killing/curing him, the injections are. Theyd have to completely twist the gameplay mechanic behind that like making it administered by hand instead of gun so that we find out paul isnt able to inject them himself or something like that
Getting attacked lowers the internal clock that is ticking until you get the "mutated ending" though you have to get hit quite a bit or take a considerably long time it seems. The game would really help having a notable health bar or watch that Paul uses to keep track of how long he has left.
@@starkiller1289yeah the big issue with those indicators is you, as a player, can only really say “that looks bad” because you have zero concept of what the stages mean. Could you have an hour? Could you have five minutes? Who knows, your arm just looks funky
Honestly a big design issue for me is the monster designs. They don’t feel connected to each other in the way that there isn’t a through-line in their designs besides “ooh scary”.
Kind of? Some of them do. The penguine flying is a really cool way of making it seem more advanced and complex of an animal, like its literally evolving. On the same hand though, the invisible wallaby makes no goddamn sense LOL
@@SocksNeedsHelpI think Dapper means a through-line with the design between species; since this is the result of a parasite I’d expect there to be a lot in common with how it forces evolution in the animals, and what structures/functions it prioritizes. Right now it comes off like each member of the design team went into their own corner of the room and drew up a “scary” version of a common zoo animal, with no communication or colaboration between them.
@@NazoPureChaos Your observations reminds me of why liked how the monster rosters function in Resident Evil games like the RE1/RE2/RE3 or even RE4, compared to Resident Evil games like RE6 and RE8... In the former set of set of RE games, there were some general consistencies with the transformations/abilities that the T-Virus, G-Virus, and Nemesis parasite could enable. Apart from the plant monsters and certain abilities of RE2's Lickers, almost every transformation in the RE1/RE2/RE3 trilogy was organically explainable by what type of creature was infected, the virus/parasite used, and the circumstances of the infection. Even the varieties of monsters in RE4 could be mostly explained by the villains create different variants of the Plaga parasites, plus the monsters still had a variety of shared strengths/weaknesses. This contrasts games like RE6 and RE8, where the C-Virus strain(s) and the Cadou Parasite could seemingly do whatever the writer wanted at any point with little rhyme or reason. So while those two games did have some neat individual monsters, the creature rosters lacked that sense of clear creative cohesion. One of the few games where a lack of predictability and clearly defined rules for the monster transformations can work well is "Bloodborne", since that deals with more supernatural or cosmic horror elements, where the whole point is that the protagonist is facing something above the known rules of nature.
You know what? I actually kinda like the trolley jumpscare. IMO, every horror game gets to have one stupid, meaningless jumpscare that has no stakes and leaves you cackling after. Too bad about the rest of the game though.
Come to think about it, a fake-out jumpscare like this can be pretty realistic where you get on edge for whatever reason and even a friend just being where you didn't expect them scares you.
This is an actual trope called a "Cat scare" - builds up tension towards a jumpscare but it turns out to be something harmless like a cat. And yeah basically every horror movie and game has at least one, usually early, since it keeps you guessing and adds to the suspense since maybe it's NOT the monster this time?
I think the wildest thing is the main character, as his first action after getting the job, is to steal animal grade mystery meat to feed to his family to save a quick buck instead of like, getting food stamps lmao Overall well done video, keep up the good work homie Edit: To my horror this has reached 700 likes, thank you all kindly
Not the point of your post but getting on food stamps is a shit show I got denied because I couldn't get someone from my community college to sign a paper verifying my enrollment.
That one really gets to me, like even if that meat wasn't infected with some parasite, that would most certainly have gotten them sick with something anyway. No sane person would ever do something like this, its so baffling. Not everything edible for animals is good for humans, I would of raided the staff break room for food before considering giving my family some random mystery meat.
And after waking up from getting roofied the first thing he asks is "erm... So i got the job??" Like homie anyone with a working frontal lobe would start freaking the hell out why is he so casual about getting kidnapped 😭
The story suffers from being a game that feels like it was meant to have more of a twist to it but the game is so ham fisted it immediately drops so much sus stuff you can guess what's going to happen. The zoo being evil from the begining isn't bad if there was more than what could be guessed from the beggining (You're infected by the evil paraside, big scary monster, the meat is people) so there's not really any buildup.
what took me out of the story most was the protagonist giving his wife the zoo meat. Like holy shit, even without the knowledge that it's human meat, it's common sense that the meat they're feeding to wild animals isn't something made for human consumption! very well made video also :-) a great watch
When I played the game I was hoping it was going to be like the thing but with animals instead of people I was hoping to see like a transformation happen right in front of me but it never happened and I was disappointed
Even if Paul was working in a normal zoo without the mutants, he should've been fired and/or arrested for stealing zoo property (the meat, likely full of vet medication) literally on his FIRST day on the job, while wearing a camera on his chest recording everything.
And yet he gets literally grinded into paste if he spends more than 30 seconds reading the fine print on the contract. What's better than comically and pettily evil antagonists? An antagonist that is INCONSISTENTLY comically and pettily evil.
What pains me the most is how this game could’ve been like a fnaf style game mixed with a simulator. This game would’ve been good game under a more competent studio and it would’ve been phenomenal. Take the movie the thing, it does a great job with body horror by having a great atmosphere and makes the monsters waaay more impactful. Like imagine you go to take care of the giraffes and you hear over your walkie that one of the gorillas broke down a door and is ripping apart staff, you think “of the gorilla is just angry” but nope it is a contant shifting mass that barely resembles a gorilla.
It kinda bothers me that these infected animals can even be cured in the first place… I mean LOOK at them they’re practically being split apart. Ain’t no way that animal that was is still alive. It’s good that they are cured but it doesn’t make any sense
@@SocksNeedsHelp Considering weirdness of biology to change the creature into monster, I would be willing to label it as just part of the parasite weirdness. It is magic but it kind of magic needed for the story like FTL drives. As such I consider it not a violation of suspension of disbelief.
@@brendenhawley2225 Most FTL Drives don't use magic though, they use theoretical science. Likewise, being able to cure the infected animals could work if you can adequately explain how, but ONLY if you adequately explain it.
@@korthalas7776I think that by “magic” in this case they just mean that you have to just take the sci-fi explanations for granted, because they don’t make sense if you actually think about them. At the end of the “heoretical science” and “magic” are both just different flavors of “this doesn’t make sense in reality, but it does work in fiction.” The only real difference is in how well understood the magic is in-universe
@@Gloomdrake That's not what theoretical science is at all. Theoretical science is a sophisticated and more developed version of a principle we've already observed or believe to exist now. In the case of FTL Drives, we know that spatial warping exists, we just don't have the tech to properly utilize it. For example, take Miguel Alcubierre. In 1994, this physicist proposed a method using Einstein's Field Equations to contract space ahead and expand space behind, creating a "Warp Bubble". Sound familiar? Many Sci-Fi use Warp Drives based on this concept.
I see now the true beauty behind this game. It's not supposed to be a horror game, it's actually the perfect metaphor for real zoochosis. It traps you as the player in a zoo and forces you to do stupid, bland, repetitive tasks with little to no actual mental stimulation. The developers were simply playing 4D chess, and none of us realized it.
The way these characters acted in this game is what got me. It's just so unrealistic, and their poorly-written dialogue doesn't help. Like, the scene where Doc explains to Paul about the Mother and the true nature of the zoo. Paul finds Sarah about to be ground up into meat, calls Doc, and Doc tells him everything. Then Sarah wakes up and starts screaming, and Paul calls Doc again, and the conversation is mostly just Doc telling him everything again? Using most of the exact same sentences he used before? So bizarre. And in the beginning, Paul's wife is waiting outside for him in the rain, but when Doc offers to let her know that Paul will be working and she can go home, he declines? Like, just lets his wife stand out there in the rain until he gives up? Who does that??? And yes, I know it was so he could give her the meat. But there were so many ways to avoid that. Paul could've accepted Doc's offer, and then his wife could've gone to the mail slot just to say goodbye before she left. And the shot, too! There's even a way to make that less insane! Like, Doc says "Hey, because you're working with animals, you have to get this vaccination. And I have to do it. Company policy." He doesn't just immediately whip out the needle and inject him. Also, how unrealistic the NDA and job itself was wouldn't have been so bad if Paul had just reacted at all to them. Like, showed a little bit of anxiety about the NDA, a little disbelief at the salary, but maybe also said something that showed how desperate of a state his family was in. So he knows this is sketchy but feels like it's his only option. Really, the fact that we never really get to see Paul react to anything is the worst. It'd be so easy to have him say "That's weird..." or "Oh my god, what is that??" or "This feels like a bad idea...but what choice do I have?" every once in a while, even if to himself, and I really think it would make the game better. ...I had a lot more to say than I thought lmao. Thank you if you read this whole thing XD
You know there's a little extra scare/ending where if Paul takes too long to sign the NDA, you get a cutscene of him crumpling up the paper and tossing it? And after which, what happens is... well :)
To clarify why Paul doesn't just poison the Mother himself, the Mother WILL eat an infected person, as shown in one of the ending you get if you pick the wrong parasite when making the poison where the Mother grabs all three of them instead of just Oliver as in the good ending. Not your fault considering how surprisingly underdeveloped the parasites and the Mother actually are. However there are also a few more plotholes I'd like to point out: 1. It's never explained why Oliver is keeping the Mother alive (as far as I know) 2. Because the game takes place over a single night, Oliver must be going through zookeepers daily. How has no one gotten suspiscous? Sure, Oliver has some influence over the police, but... 3. Oliver has enough influence to keep the police silent and have people killed to provide a steady supply of meat, and yet he doesn't staff the zoo with people in the know. I said this in a reply below but removing the secret part of the story would improve it. Have the mutations be known and have Paul knowing that he is signing up for a risky job. You could still have the twist too, with the parasite research organization having known how to kill the Mother for awhile but keeping it secret to maintain their power and influence or something.
I believe it is explained why oliver is keeping the mother alive, it kknda boils down to eugenics. The mother absorbs the genes of everything it infects and taking the parasite and augmenting it could effectively lead to a perfected human being
Honestly they could've built up more on the "Oliver has cop friends" aspect. I CONSTANTLY forget that's a thing because it's, quite frankly, absolutely irrelevant. I don't think his wife is even ware of that, which makes me wonder: Your husband disappeared into a shady ass zoo for HOURS and you aren't suspicious? They should have made a bad cop ending. If you ignore your wife, she gets suspicious and calls the cops. If you don't talk to her AND don't call her when you're in the basement, the cops get called - maybe getting you arrested for trespassing or endangering animals or whatever (they're cop friends, they can probs do whatever the fuck Oliver wants them to do) If you don't talk to her AND call her when you're in the basement, she decides against calling the cops And if you talk to her in the beginning, she also doesn't call the cops.
I just wanted a persistent threat like in alien isolation. Having one good story where animals progressively get sick and chase you down while you fulfil the MSQ would have been pretty cool.
That AI is terrifying. The fact if you use a solution too much the alien learns. Like if to keep using noise makers the aliens will look to where it was thrown from. With the flame thrower the alien will at first flee it at first sight, but later will try to corner you when you have it out to see if you’re bluffing.
@@smolboi1222 I was playing that game at night for the first time in the section where you have the motion tracker but arent being attacked by the alien yet and my partner scared the SHIEEEET out of me and grabbed my shoulders while I was in-game huddling pathetically in a stairwell checking the motion monitor because I just didnt know the alien was scripted to not attack yet. It took me years to go back and beat the game, but goddamn no other horror game has hit that height for me personally since then.
@ If you pay attention to details in the environment you can pick up that rather than most scripts where the alien is catching up to you - you are in fact catching up with the alien always arriving minutes or even seconds after it did. The perfect example is when you have to go in a vent for the first time and see that something JUST ran into that room because the light is swaying.
Tbh, I'm sort of hoping a more competent game team takes this idea and does better with it. It's really such a shame. I know that a very important person on the team passed during the creation, but they were apparently carrying the project. I had sort of mixed feelings about the game until I realized that you can find the cure and the MC DOESN'T USE IT ON HIMSELF.
To be fair, that could have been a funny gag about how some jobs have strange requirements for low-level work (it was a meme a while ago about how entry-level jobs were asking for a tonne of experience, my personal favourite being a guy who got rejected because he needed something like 3 years experience in a software that had only existed for 2 years...because he'd developed it). The main character could have acknowledged that it was stupid but he was willing to jump through those hoops because the job market was so trash.
Thats not really true. Plenty of zoos do not require zookepeers to have extensive zoological knowledge, as that can be handled by the managment and the overseers.
One of my favorite lets play videos of all time is Slimecicle’s Zoochosis playthrough. Because for the first half its him immersing himself in the story and gameplay but then the game’s flaws just slowly wear away at him until he out of character absolutely loses his shit and goes crazy. In the end he has to watch the ending on youtube because he fucked up one singular part of the parasite extraction and culminates in an absolutely desperate discord conversation with his friends about how bullshit the game is.
I'm pretty sure parasite jumpscare by the gorilla enclosure wasn't originally in the game on release, as this is the first time I'm hearing about it. Most of what I've seen of the game is from UA-camrs playing it, & all the ones who covered Zoochosis on release never experienced that scene at all. So it feeling useless makes sense; because it looks like it was added into the game after the initial waves critiques/reviews came out. They've made 20+ updates to the game so far, trying to save/improve the game, & I'd imagine that jumpscare was one of the attempts to improve the game from the state it was in on release.
@@SocksNeedsHelp If I'm not mistaken, a shot of the jumpscare was in the trailers, but wasn't actually in the game when it released, or at least during pre-release since some UA-camrs were given early access to the game. It doesn't say anywhere specifically in 20+ patch updates for the game so far as to when they added it, but there is a chance it *was* in the game on release, but was broken & the moment didn't trigger, & was fixed by the time you played it. The footage you recorded yourself of the game features the newer design for the monsters' health from patch #16 & up. (Older versions of the game had three hearts for the monsters' health, which are the versions most of the big UA-camrs originally covered.)
My biggest disappointment was no constant danger. If you actually walked through the zoo with a trolly, and were occasionally pursued by an infected animal, it would be far scarier than the repetitive boss fights. I expected everything to be far more open than it actually was, and the small spaces to explore are really just a major disappointment that limited the possibilities of a scare. Also, 27 endings, none of which require you to actually do your job and CURE the animals is insane. I’ve never liked when a game said “here’s a more difficult way to do things with no reward and no impact whatsoever”
yeah like, the feeling of running backwards with the trolley is really spooky until you realize that nothing's actually going to hurt you past a small jumpscare
personally i feel sad that this game turned out how it did, because the trailers for it had it looking MUCH better than this, and way scarier too! but from what i understand the main creative force behind this game died, so sadly i think the original intent behind the game died along with him, leading to this instead of the promised game from the trailers, this poor game was a victim of rushed development after the loss of the main creator, leading to what had a good basis but turned into a bit of a mess as likely noone else had the same ideas in their minds as the guy who was behind the main idea 😢 the lack of instructions are also a bit problematic as it left multiple players completely lost, some even completely missing out on the possibility of the good ending by not knowing how to make the right medicine to cure an infected animal (as those require blood from the infected animal, which requires you taking multiple samples beforehand so you still have leftover blood after testing the samples to learn the disease)
@SocksNeedsHelp yeah! honestly knowing this is what happened to such a wonderful looking project (based on the trailers) makes me more sad than anything? so much potential....
i honestly hoped this game wouldve played like Amnesia: The Bunker. travelling a zoo finding and curing infected animals, while infected ones could stalk you. i dont know i think having the gameplay of the bunker wouldve been awesome
When u get attacked by the mutated animals it accelerates the parasite in Paul. Thats why the bad end felt so abrupt if you didnt realise thats what was happening.
I literally thought the game would be about monitoring the animals, keeping them alive, trying to figure out which one of them has been infected and trying to cure them before they mutate and you'd have to kill them. This is not what I signed up for
That is honestly far more thrilling, actually giving you some stakes, and making the Mini-boss fight far more devastating because "getting mutated" means "a guaranteed death" for the animal. Also Oliver should give us a companion dog or something, one that we care about, one that he secretly knew is going to be mutated that soon no matter what just so that he can tell us "See, this is what happened if you slack on the job. Do you want the same fate to happen to other animals?"
I wanted to rip my ears off with the way some of the animals just scream non stop...I was like they obviously didn't do any research on how the actual animals act. Gorillas are very quiet
The fact you know when you are and are not in danger is a big problem. For example, I played Silent Hill Shattered memories and realized early on I am in no danger unless the world freezes. So, 75% of the game, I was just wondering this not scary, dreary slog.
Only having watched some youtubers play this game, the one thing I find interesting about it is that, as someone who briefly interned as a zoo keeper in college, nothing about this game is very accurate to how zoo keepers do there jobs, at least at the zoo I was at, which was a pretty good zoo. Keepers almost never enter an enclosure with a large animal, even something more docile like a giraffe, just because of how easily such a large creature could injure a human even by accident. And no one would EVER enter an enclosure with something like a moose or a hippo, because those things murder people real quick irl. There's a lot of smaller nitpicks I had as well, and that's not even necessarily a flaw for the game. Of course a shady zoo is going to have bad practices. Just something I thought about a lot. Anyway, great video!
See, I think better resouce management might have enhanced this game greatly. For instance, what if you could keep track of how far along your own infection was. Maybe using a machine to see what percentage it's progressed. And when infected animals hit you, that percentage goes up. If it gets to 100%, you die/mutate and have to start over. However, you can use limited resources to knock your infection rate down again, but by doing so you might not have enough to cure the animals. Ideally, a perfect run would be one where you cure them ahead of time/don't get hit and get to the good ending. Mixed runs would be where you had to use a lot of the antidotes on yourself and could only save SOME of the animals. Obviously, bad runs are where you fumble and either mutate too quickly or all the animals die.
Something i dont see anyone talking abt; the player character seems to be mainly engaging in medical care (really the only other thing he does is feed them). From my understanding while zookeepers do assist in medical care, its the veterinary staff that typically diagnoses & determines treatment. Given that this zookeeper is doubling as a night vet, the 100k/yr pay (not that anyone gets a chance to cash thise checks according to the lore) is actually in the average range.
3:20 The rest of the game? That plot synopsis sounded like it could reasonably be the entire game, there's more game after that? Also "all they need is 3 lethal injections to defeat them" is an awfully pronounced video game moment. That the parasites won't harm each other makes it seem like the option of directly killing infected animal like that shouldn't have been available, due to being infected they won't hurt you but you also cannot directly harm them, but they will harm the other non-infected animals so as the acting keeper you still need to find a way to subdue them, making them a puzzle under pressure situation.
@@SocksNeedsHelp there actually apparently is one connection to real Zoochosis, and it's that before they transform the parasite infected animals do infact exhibit some symptoms of actual Zoochosis.
It seems from the trailers that the idea was the animals start exhibiting the usual symptoms of typical zoochosis, but then they start to escalate into abnormality and then monstrosity. But the pacing is so bad that any "zoochosis" symptoms you might possibly observe in the game are not noticeable and are immediately overtaken by the transformation happening three seconds later 😂
I thought the entire game would play a little like papers please or that's not my neighbor, where you'd have to monitor the animals while caring for them, trying to figure out which ones were infected, for example if they wouldn't eat, had high temperature, and curing them before they mutate and kill you. I specifically avoided spoilers so I wouldn't know what exactly to look for and perfect the game on my first go. Then I hear about a giant monster and a story about you trying to kill that monster. You're telling me that I interpreted the entire game wrong from the beginning? Damn that's a disappointment.
I love the AI for the animals. One of their buddies is malformed into another monster entirely and they're just walking around like nothing's wrong :] wahoo more food!! Dw about Luna she's probably just. Hungry.
As someone who'd never heard of zoochosis before your mentions of it, this game looks so much like random shovelware you'd find on steam and i'm genuinely surprised they had some interesting mechanics and environments in there. It really feels like those weird 20 dollar chinese horror games with 23 reviews. Neat insight, and quite informative even as someone with no prior knowledge
i have an idea of how the game *could* have worked. granted, it wouldn't be called "Zoochosis", and the nature of the game would be more supernatural than scientific. actually, it could work as a separate game similar to Zoochosis. premise is, the zoo that hired you has re-opened after a timespan ranging from 5 to 10 years. the zoo's been doing rather well, despite having less than a zoo its size could have (the place would be very big); but it does stand to have even more animals, and it's severely understaffed. the owner requested particular animals for exhibits: - Indian Leopard - Bengal Tiger - Asian Elephant - Golden Eagle - Reticulated Python - Red Kangaroo - Indian Cattle (don't know which species to choose) - Maned Wolf - Grey Wolf - Wild Boar - Elk - Brown Bear - Asiatic Lion - Ibex - (probably more) this is where you come in: your job is to take care of the animals; feed, clean enclosures, etc. but something's... off. some of them are exhibiting unusual behaviour. some are abnormally big, some are of a different colour, some are constantly hungry... what's going on? after some time, a loud sound echoes throughout the zoo. you hurry to investigate, and find one of the following animals, except... it mutated into a monster: - Indian Leopard -> Panther (literally its name) - Golden Eagle -> Roc - Reticulated Python -> Dragon - Red Kangaroo -> Hooroo - Indian Gaur -> Forest Bull - Maned Wolf -> Ahuizotl - Grey Wolf -> Warg - Wild Boar -> monstrous Boar (every monster boar of mythology has a unique name) - Elk -> Wendigo - Asiatic Lion -> Manticore - Ibex -> Centicore/Yale now, let me make this as clear as possible: i wouldn't know how they would become monsters; i was inspired by some of the "animals" of bestiaries, as well as folklore. point is, your job as a zookeeper is to prevent the monsters from invading other enclosures (because bestiaries describe some of the monsters having an interaction with regular animals). or, for some of them - 3 of which being the Forest Bull, the Wendigo and the Manticore - your job is to isolate an kill them before they devour everything in their enclosure, and then escape and devour everything in the zoo, after which they'll attempt to escape and feed on the city. it'd be possible to change them back, but the zoo could stand to have some more... special exhibits. i tried my best; what do you think?
I think you should probably not be using native creatures as a gotcha when it's very obviously known you're not supposed to even say their name and most portrayals of them are whitewashed slop 💀
Sounds good, but the pop cultural idea of the hunger monster for the elk doesn't have any basis in tradition, as they're supposed to be human beings whose violation of taboo has turned them into monsters, so it doesn't match the theme as much as it appears. Perhaps the elk could be replaced with a mountain goat or bighorn sheep that turns into Krampus or another horned devil.
@@OrigamiPhoenix i know that the Elk transforming into a Wendigo makes little sense - said little sense being the modern interpretation of the monster wearing a Cervid skull and bugling like an Elk - but i already have the Warg as the wolf monster, and there are no Gorillas in America, so no Sasquatch. as for the Mountain Goat becoming Krampus or a horned demon... NO. absolutely out of the question. they're *too* humanoid for my taste - and that's from the bloke who added the (modern) Wendigo. both they and the Wendigo are demons ("daemonium" is Latin for "evil spirit", as part of the etymology of "demon"), but the latter is more animalistic (like the Werewolf and Sasquatch); and the setting is a zoo. i don't want monsters that are too humanoid for that kind of game; and just so you know, the Wendigo's already stretching it, and i'm aware of it.
@@jacktheomnithere2127 Yeah, that idea were no longer zoochosis... But that sounds fun !!quickckck Also to add, maybe instead of no reason, have the cure of said happening ARE ALSO the cause of it all. Like, maybe the zoo made a unique, special ancient relic and artifact exhibit. Most of them are donated by rich people from all around the world (who bought those from black market) that even the original owner and seller actually have little to no knowledge about the capability or the origin of those artifacts are. Have the start of the mayhem happened under a rare "blood moon" lunar eclipse. Have a crazy dave, or a crazy man, yapping nonsense near the gate of your zoo for a full day every full moon, foreshadowing the events. Maybe have it so only the player can see him, maybe have him as a spirit guardian of certain relic that follow it but cannot enter the zoo unless "The keeper of the ground", the player, "Explicitly" invite him in. Maybe you can take more inspiration from "Night at The Museum". Maybe have it so that everything was actually under control, but something else that kickstart the mayhem happened, like a power outtage, and then some relic thieves breaking in and stealing some relic (we know this is very possible, lmao) only to be attacked when said relic are too far from its container or smt then transform a nearby animal, and have those thieves throwing those relics everywhere. So now you need to gather those scattered cursed relic quick and put them back in their container, or maybe exorcise them. Maybe you can make your own twist on the lore. We all know that manticore are always about lion-snake-something flying hybrid, but maybe this time make it accidentally mix some water animals like Hippo-alligator-shark. So instead of your usual ferocious, flying, and venomous manticore, you would have this unstoppable amphibious juggernaut that can kill everything purely using its brute force. Or instead of using lizard and reptiles as a base, an artifact transform some underrated bird into a dragon, maybe kassowari, camel bird, or a peacock. And then have said dragon unable to fly and act more like a feathery T-Rex and instead of spitting fire, have them scream so loud and brutal it can rupture your inner organs and kill you that way. Ofc i am not saying to make all of your monster deviate from the usual myth, but i am just saying that exotic zoo concept (e.g: Zoonomaly) is no longer unique so if you plan to make it stands out, make it reasonably different. I mean imagine being chased by LRAD T-REX whose attack can bypass even the sturdiest bunker, or a hippopotamus hybrid that can kill you in one bite (note, normal hippo can already snap you in half). This would also incentivize you to take care of them quickly before they broke out of the zoo. I think that's all from me, i already typed too much, lol.
I think the main reason that the body horror of the animals is so lacklustre is just their environments. You encounter them in large, open, well lit and relatively safe enclosures, with plenty of cover and paths you can use to escape and hide. Compare that to something like pony factory, where you encounter them in a pitch black maze of cramped industrial corridors, where they hide in every crevice and could be around any corner. You're forced to wield only one of your gun and flashlight at a time, which means you usually only see faint glimpses of the creatures jumping at you from the darkness in your muzzle flash, which makes even the basic enemy behaviour and simple models appear terrifying. The intricate and well done designs of the mutated animals just isn't done justice by their environment and lighting compared to more competent horror games
Yeah dark corners would definitely have helped with the fear factor but tbh, idk it it would be worth sacrificing the feeling of the enclosures tbat i find to be a good thinf about the game, actually
Speaking of when I mentioned Resident Evil earlier in this comment section, imagine if this kind of gameplay (blended with elements of RE7’s demos) was used to create a fan-game set in the RE universe, where you play as an Umbrella scientist working at the Arklay Mansion. To elaborate further below… You start out as a newly recruited Umbrella scientist stationed at the Arklay Mansion. You start out being able to freely roam around and optionally enjoy the mansion’s various luxuries and leisurely activities. Once you answer the call to go down to the laboratory, you are told about a mutagenic virus Umbrella discovered, which can enhance an organism’s physiology. Your superiors claim that your assignment is to study the viruses enhancements and side-effects on different types of organisms, to see if the virus could be used to strengthen the human body against disease and traumatic injury. The organisms in question are fruit flies, spiders, sharks, a female adder snake, rats, Doberman pinschers, and even a newly discovered carnivorous plant species. Besides testing the virus, you’ll need to take care of the animals and plants, document their changes, synthesize lab chemicals, sequence mutated DNA, and write up your personal journal with a typewriter at the end of each day. Players could even be allowed to pet the dogs. As the story progresses, you observe a mixture of changes. The bugs become supersized. The snake gradually grows in size and voraciousness, earns the nickname “Yawn” by eying scientists through the glass with her mouth open, and starts unexpectedly reproducing by parthenogenesis. The mammals start showing signs of necrosis and increased aggression, while fails to acquire the full augmentations. Soon, your character gets too nosey into places only authorized personnel are allowed access to and learns the full truth. The mutagenic virus is actually a modified variant made by Umbrella, in order to turn humans into super-soldiers and animals into weaponize-able monsters. Given that he has seen them, your character is not allowed to mingle with the lower-tier workers anymore and is threatened in a similar manner as the protagonist in “Zoochosis”. Soon, your duties expand to caring for the monstrous Hunters and Chimeras, including feeding live pigs to the former. As one Easter egg, one of your coworkers is heavily implied to be the writer of the Keeper’s Diary. If the player is thorough enough. Things react rock bottom, when the player character witnesses the human experimentation, namely some zombies, the prototype Crimson Head’s brief rampage, Lisa Trevor, and the development of the T-002 Tyrant. Towards the final levels, the Mansion Incident occurs, with the T-Virus escaping containment, the U.S.S. putting the mansion in lockdown, the coworkers gradually turning into zombies, and the B.O.W. specimens breaking free from containment. At one point, another Easter egg can have the player overhearing a zombie, who attacks a character named Scott and moans, “Itchy… tasty”. As these events unfold, the gameplay slowing and seamlessly transitions into classic Survival Horror gameplay, where you have to collect weapons, find key items, manage limited ammo and medicinal items, and contend with almost all of RE1’s enemies/bosses. No matter what the player does, their character will not be able to escape alive, either succumbing to infection, being killed by a monster, or being shot by U.S.S. waiting outside the mansion. The only way for players to get a better ending is to explore as much of the RE1 locations as possible, collect as much evidence as they can, survive all encounters with the monsters, and store the evidence in a safe place. Achieving the latter will alive your character to posthumously help expose Umbrella, when the S.T.A.R.S. members later come across the journals and other evidence he collected.
@@SocksNeedsHelpoh god. AI voices, probably an AI story, useless mechanics, and much more. It’s also got that unity/unreal sheen to it (I forgot what engine it was in)
One thing that doesn’t make sense to me is when the infected animals get cured. Considering they transform in a ‘the Thing’ type way, when they get cured, there would be absolutely NO way they’d be alive after that. If they miraculously somehow still lived after that, they would either likely not live for too long, or like any normal zoo staff, the employees would put the animal out of its misery.
big fan of this! you had good points, and I enjoyed hearing you explain everything. The game has soooo much potential, and i honestly would have loved a game where you knew what was going on, the animals were already mutated, you somehow find a cure, and watch the animals unmutate (to save some of the body horror lol). It would make interacting with the now-safe animals more meaningful, and give you a tangible "your actions are making a change" type of deal. Anyways, you should play Bioshock if you haven't! It's a survival/horror with a fantastic story. I also dont do well with horror games, but i finished this one with my sanity. I think you would love it!!
This was a great video essay, and it never felt negative just for the sake of it, a problem I see a lot of other video essayists falling into. Looking forward to seeing more, glad I got recommended this.
watching the gameplay in the background like. that wouldn't pass inspection. we're not allowed to do that. why aren't the animals being shifted to different yards before you go in. WHY are you having free contact with a bachelor gorilla troop. god those pdas would be so handy. FREE CONTACT WITH HIPPOS!? starting to think this place doesn't have AZA accreditation smh
One thing that bothers me about this game is why the protagonist is carrying a bodycam to a job that he took, not to investigate the suspicious activity, but to feed his family. Even more baffling is the fact that the boss just lets him bring the camera everywhere with him despite wanting to keep everything behind closed doors. He doesn't even question why the guy he just hired brought a camera with him to his first day of work! If they wanted this to be a bodycam horror, the protagonist should've been an investigator like the woman we're supposed to rescue, not some destitute family man who's desperation leads him to stealing animal feed for supper.
he didn't though? the body cam was given to Paul so they could return the footage to the zoo's scientists. After we meet sara, the role of the camera changes to record all the wrongdoings of the zoo. I dont like this game as much as the next person but this isnt one of the things that was wrong with it haha
Honestly I’d preferred if we couldn’t cure the animals that soon. Maybe around animal 3-4 we could after going deeper into the zoo. The first few animals are in the zoo, roaming and looking for live prey now. Imagine knowing a giraffe or a zebra roaming, looking for the newest employee that they saw just an hour ago, still smelling them in the zoo.
This was one of the more insightful and in depth looks into the game that I've seen so far! I've heard the buzz around Zoochosis and also its downfall, but I haven't played the game myself and I was curious. I think you should continue along the video essayist route as you seem quite talented at it! Though I may be biased because I only come to UA-cam FOR its video essays haha
Zoochosis,, what a missed opportunity. I wanted to have hope, but considering this is the same studio that made Sparky Marky, I was careful with my expectations ^^;; It really sucks that they lost their creative director. Back when the trailers first came out, I bet that was his vision. It's sad Clapperhead didn't take the time to try and bring that vision to life :[ I know release dates and deadlines are tough, but I feel like the general public would have understood. On another note: This is the first video of yours I've ever watched, and I had no idea you weren't a variety commentary UA-camr! You're very well-spoken and your descriptions and points were easy to follow along with- and your voice was very nice to listen to lol. Overall a very good video and I'm super glad I clicked. I've never played Risk of Rain but I'll have to give your other stuff a peek. 10/10 would watch again :]
Zoochosis may be the biggest disappointment in gaming for me, I was so excited for it, I'm glad that I was too busy the week it came out. So I saw the fallout of it before I bought it.
@SocksNeedsHelp I'm sorry. heres hoping you at least dodged Battleborn 8 years ago. that was the second biggest disappointment. but that one caught me sadly
as someone with an interest in infectious diseas and virology they really didnt put much into which diseases to use. like- like meningitis is a severely infectious illness, the chances of only one animal in an enclosure having it and showing symptoms to begin with is low, but why is it just a shot to fix it when the actual treatments for meningitis (not taking into account different varieties of said illness) involve isolation and several routes of treating it, not just a quick shot and calling it a day. it feels really single note and i wish more attention had been paid to the illnesses and treatments.
I think really if you want a version of this game that actually relies on horror you’d have to stick with either subtle storytelling or less task-based gameplay. I’ve had such severe brainrot over what this game could’ve been that I’ve tried reworking it to see if I can find any way to redeem the storyline (though my version cuts out a lot of characters, and the Mother). You still play as Paul Connelly, working at Pine Valley Zoo in order to help support your wife and daughter, although you are a trained exotic animals veterinarian. You’ve been brought in from a different zoo to help treat sick animals, as this particular zoo seems to consistently have issues with its animals becoming unwell. You meet your boss, who ensures that your vaccinations are in order, before mentioning that you need a specific vaccination as there’s a possibility that you’ll be working with penguins, and you agree. After signing the contract, you’re led to a professional-looking laboratory/veterinary clinic and given your ‘vaccine’ (which obviously, like the game is an injection of a parasite, although not one that’s so alien like). You begin the gameplay on Monday, and this portion of the game is tutorial-based, as in-game, your boss wants to see whether or not you will prove to be a reliable asset to the zoo, and most importantly to curing the animals, by allowing you to learn game mechanics by treating birds, such as lovebirds and parrots. I’d use the tutorial section to set up the seedy nature of employers towards the animals there - seeing these types of animals as disposable. The game mechanics specifically would be similar to those already in the game: seeing if the animals are eating, taking temperatures, and taking blood and fecal samples, but with a change - when an animal is flagged as being sick, the play has to work out whether the illness is bacterial, viral, or parasitic based on the samples already gathered, or new tasks that will narrow down the diagnosis. As the tutorial progresses, the player would be able to treat Birds of Prey, and during this section of the tutorial, the animals begin to show symptoms of zoochosis (linking the gameplay to the name) as their enclosures are clearly not stimulating enough for them, although the player character doesn’t initially register this as a potential cause of the illnesses. Days 2 and 3 (Tuesday and Wednesday) would be where I’d have the gameplay begin to pick up, with your character being able to treat small mammals, such as meerkats, fennec foxes, and red pandas. The player continues checking the animals’ health, noting the symptoms of zoochosis, until they find a meerkat female displaying unusually heightened levels of aggression, even partaking in self-mutilation. When the player runs tests, the animal presents as having some form of infection, that has physical symptoms that match a bacte infection, but the animal’s behavioural symptoms make no sense with the diagnosis - the player character even considers the possibility of the animal suffering from some level of zoochosis. Treating the animal anyway, the player finishes their tasks for the day. Wednesday opens with the player returning to the meerkat’s cage, only to find that the meerkat has killed multiple of its cagemates. Here the player has to involve their boss, who, if the player chooses to bring up the conditions the animals are kept in, will dismiss it, and say that their enclosures have been approved by quote unquote ‘specialists’. The boss then captures the meerkat, and implies that they’re taking it to have it put to sleep, telling the player that sometimes things like this happen, and if the general public knew what a cruel and vicious place the animal kingdom really was, then they’d never even dream of visiting zoos, making a final comment that the player has otherwise shown good capability, and will be allowed to begin curing a section of the zoo of their choice - told to pick an area they specialise in. You continue your day, although the small mammals seem to be acting more aggressively towards you than usual, and as night falls, you swear that you feel as if they’re hunting you, or at least, something lurking in the dark is. As the player exits from the final enclosure, they catch a glimpse something much bigger than the animals they’ve been looking after so far, something with too many eyes, too many legs, the sound of breathing strangely disjointed, as if whatever this creature is breathing from two mouths. As quickly as this encounter starts, it’s over, leaving both the character and the player confused and baffled as what just happened. Once the player returns to the veterinary centre, they’re given a choice as to which area of the zoo they wish to focus on from four options: Big cats, Apes, Savannah animals, and Arctic animals. Thursday gameplay occurs the same as Tuesday and Wednesday gameplay - there are multiple sick animals, with one or two presenting with symptoms of zoochosis, alongside other symptoms, leading to the player not being able to diagnose what the animals are suffering from acutely enough to treat them. They bring this up to their boss, who tasks them with the task of trying to identify the source of this infection, and potentially produce a cure, but of course as the character is only an exotic animals vet, this requires abilities beyond their skillset. They stay longer, tasked with studying the creatures’ behaviours over the course of Thursday to Saturday but are free to explore more behind the scenes areas of the zoo, which, if done thoroughly enough, will lead to the player finding clues and notes that point to what is actually going on (the zoo is actually an undercover animal testing facility, bio-engineering a pathogen/parasite that can induce psychotic behaviour in both humans and animals. The people testing the pathogen need to see how animals infected respond to people, how well the parasite spreads, and whether there’s any human/animal transmission. The vaccine you were given at the start of the game was actually the parasite, and as the game progresses, the effects of this manifest.) Each day, the player is given a new set of animals to care for, and at night, the infected animals become hostile towards the player, mutating into grotesque versions of themselves seen in the game. The player has to navigate surviving these mutations, collecting samples from them, as well as testing the other animals in order to find some sort of vaccine or cure to the parasitic infection. There are times that the player should begin to question whether or not the mutations are real or if the player is taking the route of working out what’s going on in the zoo, whether they’re just a side effect of their own infection. Saturday is the final day of the game, and the one where the player must face the most hostile/dangerous animal in their chosen specialty. The night mode is especiall hard, as the other mutations they’ve had to deal with have escaped from their enclosures - the player is being stalked through a dark zoo at night, with no clear way to dispatch or fight back against the horrific animal abominations chasing them, with a plan for a cure that either has no effectiveness or has the possibility to put an end to this animal testing nightmare, depending on the player’s level of knowledge. The game ends with the player injecting themselves with the cure, resulting in a ‘good’ or a bad ending. In the bad ending, the player is not cured, and is forced to watch their own body transform into something Lovecraftian, not even human, as their body succumbs to the infection. In the ‘good’ ending, the player is able to cure themselves, and sets out to cure the afflicted animals, but is prevented by their boss, who applauds them, and offers them a choice: they can either join their team of researchers, and contribute to the animal testing, which while goes against the character’s moral code, would provide them with enough of an income that their family can live comfortably, or the boss will be forced to kill them. If the player chooses to join the researchers, the game ends with the player given a small insight into the true exent of the underground operation. If they refuse, the boss leaves them to the infected animals, which are not shown to be either simply psychotic animals, or truly the grotesque mutations seen earlier in the game. That’d be my idea for zoochosis!! Feel free to let me know what you think in the replies!!
i think the only thing with the jumpscares is that it locks you out of the good ending if you get got ""too much"" due to several things that can happen. one of them is sara is scared of how infected you are and locks you in a bathroom. theres another one i dont remember, but ive also heard that its unclear how much is ""too much"" for the animal attacks. Still lame and unscary though unfortunately, especially since getting new endings requires you to fully replay the game and most people wont want to do so. edit: watched a little further, thats why you got that ending i believe. spoilers if you dont want to know the way to get the good ending; to make sure you arent hit too much and of course collect the parasites. i dont think curing the animals matters at all lol. save sara and all that, warn your wife with the phone about the food and then she wont be there for the man to kill, iirc
couldn't personally play the game because i am sensitive to animal harm (which i thought was gonna happen from the trailer) so thanks for this amazing review!
I really liked this actually!!! Really outlines what the issues are with the game. I am curious if you had an alternative version of the game? Like an idealized version if you got to make Zoochosis (hope this makes sense haha!)
I dont know, i dont ever want to claim that i could do better than them or anything. I just think if they let go of rhe chore aspect a bit and leaned into the story a lot more it would have been way more fun
I can't believe this is your first video essay, you did so well! I definitely want to make my own videos more organized/planned out, it's just so time consuming and I have so much else on my plate that it's hard to find the energy to even try. But you've given me inspiration to try anyway. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
This is my first time seeing a video of yours, and the first thing I did afterwards was look for more video essays from you. I personally am always looking for more videos like these, and would be interesting in seeing more of these from you
I wish they could've had things work slower with the mutations of the animals. I know they probably rushed it out after the creative director passed away, but they could've put more polish on it.
Honestly because Moose are able to swim, how come they didn't add a chase scence where the moose swims after the player. Also Gorillas don't make much noise, I imagine the gorilla that is mutated to be more like a tiger and it crawls at you slowly when you aren't looking,
@SocksNeedsHelp Fr though, plus most animals that are quiet don't make much noise. I hate that when the player gets near the infected animal, it constantly roars when most of the animals, including the wallaby irl, are usually animals that don't make as much noise, Zebras do make sounds but not as much. And they could have a scene to show how the animal mutated in the first place, and then the mutated animal starts to slowly stalk the player when they aren't looking. It's just a suggestion I have about making the game a lot better. And because elephants are pretty smart, I'm sure the infected 🐘 would immediately find an item, and smack the player with it as a jumpscare.
THANK YOU for providing positive points and praise, far too many essay videos slide into slander and negativity with 0 acknowledgement of what the game did do well. It really improves the quality of videos like this and curates a healthier mindset and audience. Good job!
Just discovered your channel with this video - personally, I look forward to more videos like this one from you! If you're interested in the subject matter and you enjoy making the video, I'm sure you won't go wrong.
What really kills the horror is the fact that everything happens within a single night. No build up, no subtle foreshadowing to something deeper, scarier, and horrific. Just BAM human meat BAM you're infected BAM the animals are turning BAM the Mother BAM the parasites BAM you're mutating. You don't get attached to the characters or even the animals. It's just "oh well I guess that wallaby is gone RIP. anyways." Also, really odd they included lines about it being odd for there to be a lab or scientist at a zoo. Both are essential when taking care of animals because they need to make pharmaceuticals and be able to monitor the health of the animals. Zoologists are scientists in the field of animals after all, and all zoos need them to help out. I was so confused when Doc said there wasn't a lab of any kind. Pacing is the most important foundation for storytelling and Zoochosis had the pacing of a wild hamster on a wheel. Everything is a blur and a bore, all that matters is doing what you're doing until you're dead. Stretching out the story to across several days, maybe a week or two would really help in the build-up and anticipation of "when will an animal turn and which will it be?". It would also give players a chance to become friendly and familiar to the animals, adding a bit of despair when they do turn and a motivation to keep the animals healthy. The PDA system for story also only really works in incredibly large environments like in Subnautica. In a heavily limited space like the zoo, the story benefits more from social interactions with maybe a few tidbits of PDAs that the players might have to sneakily copy data from later in the story. It'd probably make more sense to be working with the people like CJ and Sarah, only for them to randomly vanish after a while, giving Paul incentive to investigate and go against the zoo halfway.
@SocksNeedsHelp don't have to be negative! I just meant video essays about games! I watched your Edith finch one that was mostly positive, and it was very solid too!
6:27 i think if you get knocked over enough you get turned into a monster, i watched someone else play (slmccl) and he was going for the good ending the second time around (curing all the animals and finding the female parasite), and got turned into the full monster after "ignoring the symptoms" of the parasite, blah blah blah, he ends us killing the director and the girl and the end.
@@SocksNeedsHelp yeah, i was kinda disappointed in the game a little bit, but it was mostly hidden by the actual creator because he tried to make the game play as engaging as possible. it was funny yet tragic when he realized after his second playthrough that the only reason he didn't get the good ending the first time was because he accidentally clicked on a male parasite💀
One thing I don't understand is how is it possible for the animals to get cured Like... the gorillas get split in HALF, the zebras get so messed up their digestive system gets turned upside down however when you cure them they go back to just how they were before, they don't even have any short of scar. It would have been ten times more interesting if the first parasitic animal escapes and all animals are in danger of getting infected too so you have to be running around the zoo bewaring of the mutated animal while trying to vaccinate the others so they don't mutate and also take them to safety and if one gets infected then there is no way to save it aside of putting an end to its misery so it doesn't create more infecteds, it would also get rid of the plot holes related to Paul because for how he is presented it just seems like your average "company is evil and corrupted mwahaha" kind of guy that does things just because he is so evil.
Great video thanks for putting all the work in to edit and write this! I will say I watched it on stream with a silly streamer and the whole game just seemed frustrating and janky.
There is a certain way in which games that have a very set formula, such as the zookeeping tasks here, need to break that formula early and often to be effective. Its not always the case, but definitely for horror it benefits from establishing the normal flow of the game, and then disrupting that flow. The zookeeping busywork should have been leveraged to make the player feel secure, oh this is just regular tasks im fine, and then disrupted to throw them off balance and destroy their sense of security. Carefully building up that sense of normalcy, of safety, and then taking it away in unpredictable ways is in my opinion the key to this kind of horror. In this game though, the infected animal just appears in a hallway each time. Its predictable, normal. Youre never put in the position of having to guess what might happen next, never have your feeling of safety eroded by the unpredictability of the horror.
A cool idea that I think would've made the game a bit better would've been a hard mode. In it, you would play the game uninfected and if you got too close to an infected animal, it would immediately transform. I also would've added some carnivores to the animal line-up like polar bears, lions, and crocodiles to give a believable reason as to why meat was included for the animals. It would've also made things morally challenging to the player/character when it is revealed what kind of meat is being used.
Personally I am the opposite, for me the game was REALLY easy to figure out. To the point of extreme boredom. Just choose all the options that don't help you directly. I was able to use the medicine after the second try because I was like "oh I just have to find the commonality" and THEN I was like "OHHHHH I need BLOOD" and then I got the good ending on accident my second playthrough If I could do an endless mode of JUST the animal disease curing, with more complex gameplay, better puzzles, and Paul doesn't speak a damn word I would, but thats not the game I got. So I had an alright time, and I thought the monsters were badass But it wasn't very scary.
It's a shame. The game had real potiental, and the monster designs are really unique and intresting. I heard that the creative director and story writer died, and you can kinda tell when playing when they lost him. The quality definitely shifts
The antagonist: Hey buddy if a woman calls you to say something about her husband don't pay atention to her she is just crazy everything here is pretty normal Me: Ok LITERALLY LESS THAN 30 MINUTES OF GAMEPLAY AFTER The Antagonist: Hey buddy i sent you a woman to turn her into animal food Me: WHY WOULD YOU BOTHER TRYING TO MAKE THINK EVERYTHING HERE IS NORMAL IF YOU WERE GOING TO ASK ME THIS!!! IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE
Honestly, the game had the potential to be challenging if the animals weren't so docile (have you seen what a panicked gorilla can do to a human or the injuries a hippo can inflict on someone trespassing on its territory). Imagine trying to cure the animals while the others are p*ssed at you for running up to them and trying to inject them with no context of how the infection works. What I don't like about the cure is that the animals that have been mangled by the transformation magically return to normal instead of screaming in agony and dying once they gain consciousness and the pain kicks in (it undermines the body horror aspect)
@@SocksNeedsHelp It's like the Walking Dead cure hypothesis. If a cure were to be discovered, it would only work for people who have been infected recently and not eaten alive and turned into zombies. Those missing limbs lost blood, and hanging organs aren't going to magically fix themselves 😅🤣
I agree with most of your points, and I really feel like this game could have been so much more. But, unless the devs changed it in an update since Slmccl's playthrough I watched, I feel like your criticisms on the animal cures isn't really fair? As long as you've scanned all the animals and have their symptoms, you can toggle the symptom buttons above the diseases panel on the diagnosis tab and it will show you the right one. I'm pretty sure there's only one disease for each symptom combo. To be fair to you, if you were going mostly off of the descriptions for the medicines and diseases, I see where the devs may have dropped the ball. Still, I don't think the devs are forcing you into making a wrong decision, they really just have made a few bad choices in teaching the player how the system works.
@@SocksNeedsHelp I definitely agree with that. I just think that there is an important difference between a game forcing you into making errors, and a game that fails to explain critical mechanics. One is a basic game design problem, and the other is more an indication that they didn't have much playtester feedback.
It feels like they kinda forced it out because they lost interest in it after the one team member passed away (it seems like maybe he was the one with all the passion for it) and the voicelines feel very... empty. They don't have a lot of emotion in it. Also my god I wish they toned down the vomiting scenes, it's so off-putting and makes my emetophobia flare up so I have to skip through pieces of gameplay everytime via the 10 sec skip ahead on mobile. Also i think the sick animal is always fully healthy, but mimicks the behaviors of the sick ones (making weird noises, spooking easily, vomiting, but all whilst having perfect vitals).
The biggest issue I have with this game is just that it feels blatantly unfinished. Not 5 minutes into the first playthrough I watched on it, and there were already multiple jarring cases of poorly timed dialogue, namely overlaps, and iirc one time where a part of the previous line's caption get repeated, but not the actual line (though idk which would bother me more). I really wish we could see what this game could've been like if they put another 6 months or so, maybe another year even, into just generally polishing things up even if not improving/expanding the actual gameplay.
I think what also takes away from the game is that you can't lose your animals, it's incredibly easy to save them and they just straight-up return to their healthy versions because of a few injections. The players' attachment to them should be capitalized on, there should be some time pressure and some animals should be extremely hard to save or impossible to cure. They mutate to the point of being split in half, at least let them be mutated and disabled/suffering when you do save them. It takes away the immersion to have them be cured so easily.
@SocksNeedsHelp I believe a lot of tiktoks (I'm not sure if the official zoochosis one posted) promised that choosing which animals to save would impact the ending/gameplay, but it really just... doesn't. I was hoping for a time limit, maybe training the animals to run/fight, having to sacrifice some, etc. But I guess they were too afraid to kill animals in a game that was supposed to be an animal zombie plague.
I really like the infected animal designs but unfortunately without seeing the transformation it doesnt actaully make you scared. I look at them and think "hm neat" and thats it.
Sadly, the creative director, story writer and probably the dude with the original idea, all one person by the way, died halfway through the game's development. They finished the game on their own, releasing it as a homage to him. I still think it's not really worth the price, but hell, I can't hate it too much. You can feel the quality shift as the game progresses, along with the abrupt ending, over reliance on newgame+, due to them losing the man at the helm of it all.
I def did expect more, due to the trailer, but Death itself prevented that trailer from becoming reality.
yeah thats pretty rough. i think it would have been better to just hold onto it for a bit longer yk? let it cook more
@@SocksNeedsHelp Absolutely agree.
@@SocksNeedsHelp you can't cook without the chef
@@nathanlamberth7631 i suppose, butni think that means they shouldn't have tried
Not to sound like I disrespect the creative director. But are we sure that he would have made the game different? It's possible that they are relying on people thinking the game is just bad because the genius behind it is dead rather than the game just being bad.
Im still not over how the protag decides to give his wife and kid animal feed to eat, then the wife actually cooks it, then she gives it to not only her kid but neighbors???? Even the insane scientist boss gets shocked by this
yeah its like why... would you do this man. why
Seeing some of the food going to waste for seemingly no reason and deciding to knick it would have been fine. An animal not eating all of its portion or something because it’s sick. If you’re poor you’re willing to eat slop and wouldn’t want to see food going to waste. The food being labeled as “gourmet” cuts or something and wondering why these animals are getting such good food while you’re starving.
But just Taking It being your FIRST COURSE OF ACTION is fucking craaaaazy. All of those half thought up things would have also really stressed the idea you’re fucking desperate and stuff too. Instead the guy just seems kinda stupid - no wonder he can’t get a fucking job if he’s willing to steal so effortlessly and quickly.
@@SocksNeedsHelp you do have the option to tell her to not eat it.
@@brendenhawley2225 You also have the choice to just not give it to her at all, but IIRC that requires you ignore your wife entirely at the start.
Even then, the fact that it’s an option at all is crazy.
@@electricbayonet2 That I think actually makes sense. The guy went for the job because he was so poor he could not even afford decent food. Which is why he went for the zoo meat. Had the guy been making ends meat, he would of not sent the meat or got the job in the first place.
Honestly I was hyped for the idea of a Zoo simulator/management game mixed with horror elements. Like actually being able to go around the zoo, tend to animals, let visitors in in the day time, etc. while also fending off the parasites that turn your animals. It would've been super fun and sick as hell but nah. We got uhh, linear plot that makes no sense.
shame it ended up like this for real
Like fnaf 6?
Someone I watched play it tried to play it like an actual zoo keeper, trying to bond with the animals and getting genuinely upset when they died/were sick. And then it didn't really matter because the game doesn't reward you for saving them, if anything, it punishes you. Kind of ruined the point of having it set in a zoo imo
One of my favorite little things (not any major issue, just something I found kinda funny) is that all the marketing really hyped up the mutant giraffe as, like, the "main" monster. All the posters and trailers and even the steam thumbnail all prominently feature the mutant giraffe. It's basically the game's mascot.
And in the actual game, the giraffe enclosure is the tutorial. Meaning that it's basically guaranteed they won't mutate during your first playthrough.
@@ShadowsAndScience right? Really hyped it up for not even being that big of a deal. The fact i only saw 2 infected animals in my first playthrough is actually embarrassing
false advertising 101, man.
my first red flag was the fact that the trailers had almost zero gameplay
well they did have gameplay but it was all locked animations and such
Maybe leaning into the parasites won’t harm each other reasoning would have worked to make it unsettling? Like Paul can’t poison the mother, he can’t kill the animals, he can’t even cure them because he’s infected too and can’t act on his own accord
@@artemiscrimson but... he can cute and kill them?
@@SocksNeedsHelpI think they meant as a suggestion to change, not current gameplay. Making it so that Paul can't cure them or kill them, not that he can't currently.
@@xxsharkloverxx Seconding. OP's intent was that the game should have included Paul being unable to cure or kill the parasites as a lore element.
I guess this would have prompted a need for a different game mechanic though, like some kind of parasite tranquillisers rather than "cures".
@5H4RKU8US i guess but i mean, paul isnt killing/curing him, the injections are. Theyd have to completely twist the gameplay mechanic behind that like making it administered by hand instead of gun so that we find out paul isnt able to inject them himself or something like that
@@SocksNeedsHelp he deciding to use the gun, so it could be his intent that triggers it.
Getting attacked lowers the internal clock that is ticking until you get the "mutated ending" though you have to get hit quite a bit or take a considerably long time it seems. The game would really help having a notable health bar or watch that Paul uses to keep track of how long he has left.
@starkiller1289 i figures theres might have been something like that but the fact you cant keep track of it and kind of have no warning is crazy
@@SocksNeedsHelp At best the "warnings" you get are his increased vomiting and sickly veins both are very poor indicators though.
yeah but like i said i thought it would be like subnautica where the disease gets worse as you progress but it doesnt kill you
@@starkiller1289yeah the big issue with those indicators is you, as a player, can only really say “that looks bad” because you have zero concept of what the stages mean. Could you have an hour? Could you have five minutes? Who knows, your arm just looks funky
Honestly a big design issue for me is the monster designs. They don’t feel connected to each other in the way that there isn’t a through-line in their designs besides “ooh scary”.
Kind of? Some of them do. The penguine flying is a really cool way of making it seem more advanced and complex of an animal, like its literally evolving. On the same hand though, the invisible wallaby makes no goddamn sense LOL
@@SocksNeedsHelpI think Dapper means a through-line with the design between species; since this is the result of a parasite I’d expect there to be a lot in common with how it forces evolution in the animals, and what structures/functions it prioritizes. Right now it comes off like each member of the design team went into their own corner of the room and drew up a “scary” version of a common zoo animal, with no communication or colaboration between them.
@@NazoPureChaos Thank you, that is what I meant.
I especially wonder what kind of drugs they were on with the zebra design. 😅
@@NazoPureChaos
Your observations reminds me of why liked how the monster rosters function in Resident Evil games like the RE1/RE2/RE3 or even RE4, compared to Resident Evil games like RE6 and RE8...
In the former set of set of RE games, there were some general consistencies with the transformations/abilities that the T-Virus, G-Virus, and Nemesis parasite could enable. Apart from the plant monsters and certain abilities of RE2's Lickers, almost every transformation in the RE1/RE2/RE3 trilogy was organically explainable by what type of creature was infected, the virus/parasite used, and the circumstances of the infection. Even the varieties of monsters in RE4 could be mostly explained by the villains create different variants of the Plaga parasites, plus the monsters still had a variety of shared strengths/weaknesses.
This contrasts games like RE6 and RE8, where the C-Virus strain(s) and the Cadou Parasite could seemingly do whatever the writer wanted at any point with little rhyme or reason. So while those two games did have some neat individual monsters, the creature rosters lacked that sense of clear creative cohesion. One of the few games where a lack of predictability and clearly defined rules for the monster transformations can work well is "Bloodborne", since that deals with more supernatural or cosmic horror elements, where the whole point is that the protagonist is facing something above the known rules of nature.
You know what? I actually kinda like the trolley jumpscare. IMO, every horror game gets to have one stupid, meaningless jumpscare that has no stakes and leaves you cackling after. Too bad about the rest of the game though.
I think its silly but idk... still a bit lame. I agree that its good to have a lighthearted scare or two
Come to think about it, a fake-out jumpscare like this can be pretty realistic where you get on edge for whatever reason and even a friend just being where you didn't expect them scares you.
Map Bot, my loathed 💜
specimen 1 my beloved
This is an actual trope called a "Cat scare" - builds up tension towards a jumpscare but it turns out to be something harmless like a cat. And yeah basically every horror movie and game has at least one, usually early, since it keeps you guessing and adds to the suspense since maybe it's NOT the monster this time?
I think the wildest thing is the main character, as his first action after getting the job, is to steal animal grade mystery meat to feed to his family to save a quick buck instead of like, getting food stamps lmao
Overall well done video, keep up the good work homie
Edit: To my horror this has reached 700 likes, thank you all kindly
literally like. why.
thanks! Already started on the next non-ror2 video essay
Not the point of your post but getting on food stamps is a shit show I got denied because I couldn't get someone from my community college to sign a paper verifying my enrollment.
im sure, but stealing mystery zoo meat should not have even been an option
That one really gets to me, like even if that meat wasn't infected with some parasite, that would most certainly have gotten them sick with something anyway.
No sane person would ever do something like this, its so baffling.
Not everything edible for animals is good for humans, I would of raided the staff break room for food before considering giving my family some random mystery meat.
And after waking up from getting roofied the first thing he asks is "erm... So i got the job??"
Like homie anyone with a working frontal lobe would start freaking the hell out why is he so casual about getting kidnapped 😭
The story suffers from being a game that feels like it was meant to have more of a twist to it but the game is so ham fisted it immediately drops so much sus stuff you can guess what's going to happen. The zoo being evil from the begining isn't bad if there was more than what could be guessed from the beggining (You're infected by the evil paraside, big scary monster, the meat is people) so there's not really any buildup.
yeah its lame that there isnt much of a build up or anything
@@SocksNeedsHelp Oof just a heads up, but "lame" is an ableist slur, and we don't use slurs!
@@oxymoron02 ... what? Um... if you say so
@@oxymoron02 lame is what happens to a horse nitwit
@@oxymoron02since when is "lame" a god damn slur? It can be an insult but an ableist slur? The hell?
what took me out of the story most was the protagonist giving his wife the zoo meat. Like holy shit, even without the knowledge that it's human meat, it's common sense that the meat they're feeding to wild animals isn't something made for human consumption!
very well made video also :-) a great watch
I shoulda honed in on that more cuz like actuallt why would he do that
I worked at a zoo and yeah, so true. Half the meat had bugs literally mixed into it cause that’s what that animal liked! Definitely not for people 😭
@@helenward6786I mean bugs are a delicacy in some countries... but that's because they prepared it in a way that's y'know, safe for people to eat?
When I played the game I was hoping it was going to be like the thing but with animals instead of people I was hoping to see like a transformation happen right in front of me but it never happened and I was disappointed
Right? Imagine if there were a chance for the animal to turn as you were taking their blood or something like that. It'd have been so cool
@@SocksNeedsHelp what the hell?! That's literally showcased in the trailer with the Giraffe. Now I'm mad >:V
Even if Paul was working in a normal zoo without the mutants, he should've been fired and/or arrested for stealing zoo property (the meat, likely full of vet medication) literally on his FIRST day on the job, while wearing a camera on his chest recording everything.
And yet he gets literally grinded into paste if he spends more than 30 seconds reading the fine print on the contract. What's better than comically and pettily evil antagonists? An antagonist that is INCONSISTENTLY comically and pettily evil.
What pains me the most is how this game could’ve been like a fnaf style game mixed with a simulator. This game would’ve been good game under a more competent studio and it would’ve been phenomenal. Take the movie the thing, it does a great job with body horror by having a great atmosphere and makes the monsters waaay more impactful. Like imagine you go to take care of the giraffes and you hear over your walkie that one of the gorillas broke down a door and is ripping apart staff, you think “of the gorilla is just angry” but nope it is a contant shifting mass that barely resembles a gorilla.
What could have been...
We need less fnaf horror, it's oversaturated
i mean i would imagine an angry gorilla would be terrifying whether or not it's a shifting mass of meat
@@TheHQZombieLet me correct you. Over saturated with bad or just plain copies.
@@Armadillo-bg2qi That's not correction, that's redundancy. It's implied that's the case with the word "oversaturated" silly goose
It kinda bothers me that these infected animals can even be cured in the first place… I mean LOOK at them they’re practically being split apart. Ain’t no way that animal that was is still alive. It’s good that they are cured but it doesn’t make any sense
@@katzuma7641 that too.
@@SocksNeedsHelp Considering weirdness of biology to change the creature into monster, I would be willing to label it as just part of the parasite weirdness. It is magic but it kind of magic needed for the story like FTL drives. As such I consider it not a violation of suspension of disbelief.
@@brendenhawley2225 Most FTL Drives don't use magic though, they use theoretical science. Likewise, being able to cure the infected animals could work if you can adequately explain how, but ONLY if you adequately explain it.
@@korthalas7776I think that by “magic” in this case they just mean that you have to just take the sci-fi explanations for granted, because they don’t make sense if you actually think about them. At the end of the “heoretical science” and “magic” are both just different flavors of “this doesn’t make sense in reality, but it does work in fiction.” The only real difference is in how well understood the magic is in-universe
@@Gloomdrake That's not what theoretical science is at all. Theoretical science is a sophisticated and more developed version of a principle we've already observed or believe to exist now. In the case of FTL Drives, we know that spatial warping exists, we just don't have the tech to properly utilize it.
For example, take Miguel Alcubierre. In 1994, this physicist proposed a method using Einstein's Field Equations to contract space ahead and expand space behind, creating a "Warp Bubble". Sound familiar? Many Sci-Fi use Warp Drives based on this concept.
I see now the true beauty behind this game. It's not supposed to be a horror game, it's actually the perfect metaphor for real zoochosis. It traps you as the player in a zoo and forces you to do stupid, bland, repetitive tasks with little to no actual mental stimulation. The developers were simply playing 4D chess, and none of us realized it.
@@dr.narwhalmd4885 woah......... no way
Maybe the real zoochosis was the friends we made along the way.
The night mother? @@obsiangravel
The way these characters acted in this game is what got me. It's just so unrealistic, and their poorly-written dialogue doesn't help. Like, the scene where Doc explains to Paul about the Mother and the true nature of the zoo. Paul finds Sarah about to be ground up into meat, calls Doc, and Doc tells him everything. Then Sarah wakes up and starts screaming, and Paul calls Doc again, and the conversation is mostly just Doc telling him everything again? Using most of the exact same sentences he used before? So bizarre. And in the beginning, Paul's wife is waiting outside for him in the rain, but when Doc offers to let her know that Paul will be working and she can go home, he declines? Like, just lets his wife stand out there in the rain until he gives up? Who does that???
And yes, I know it was so he could give her the meat. But there were so many ways to avoid that. Paul could've accepted Doc's offer, and then his wife could've gone to the mail slot just to say goodbye before she left. And the shot, too! There's even a way to make that less insane! Like, Doc says "Hey, because you're working with animals, you have to get this vaccination. And I have to do it. Company policy." He doesn't just immediately whip out the needle and inject him.
Also, how unrealistic the NDA and job itself was wouldn't have been so bad if Paul had just reacted at all to them. Like, showed a little bit of anxiety about the NDA, a little disbelief at the salary, but maybe also said something that showed how desperate of a state his family was in. So he knows this is sketchy but feels like it's his only option. Really, the fact that we never really get to see Paul react to anything is the worst. It'd be so easy to have him say "That's weird..." or "Oh my god, what is that??" or "This feels like a bad idea...but what choice do I have?" every once in a while, even if to himself, and I really think it would make the game better.
...I had a lot more to say than I thought lmao. Thank you if you read this whole thing XD
maybe it was made by an AI who knows?
You know there's a little extra scare/ending where if Paul takes too long to sign the NDA, you get a cutscene of him crumpling up the paper and tossing it? And after which, what happens is... well :)
Zootopia 2 is looking way different then I imagined 🤔
@@Mrbeatlesmusic64 zootobia 2: hopps revenge... coming to theaters march 2025...
Ware if this is! Is prequal to zootoopoiles 😨😱😨😱😨😱😨😱
Its all just a fever dream in nicks head. Too many night howlers
To clarify why Paul doesn't just poison the Mother himself, the Mother WILL eat an infected person, as shown in one of the ending you get if you pick the wrong parasite when making the poison where the Mother grabs all three of them instead of just Oliver as in the good ending. Not your fault considering how surprisingly underdeveloped the parasites and the Mother actually are. However there are also a few more plotholes I'd like to point out:
1. It's never explained why Oliver is keeping the Mother alive (as far as I know)
2. Because the game takes place over a single night, Oliver must be going through zookeepers daily. How has no one gotten suspiscous? Sure, Oliver has some influence over the police, but...
3. Oliver has enough influence to keep the police silent and have people killed to provide a steady supply of meat, and yet he doesn't staff the zoo with people in the know.
I said this in a reply below but removing the secret part of the story would improve it. Have the mutations be known and have Paul knowing that he is signing up for a risky job. You could still have the twist too, with the parasite research organization having known how to kill the Mother for awhile but keeping it secret to maintain their power and influence or something.
I believe it is explained why oliver is keeping the mother alive, it kknda boils down to eugenics. The mother absorbs the genes of everything it infects and taking the parasite and augmenting it could effectively lead to a perfected human being
@@SocksNeedsHelp whoah, crazy. i didnt even know that
Honestly they could've built up more on the "Oliver has cop friends" aspect. I CONSTANTLY forget that's a thing because it's, quite frankly, absolutely irrelevant. I don't think his wife is even ware of that, which makes me wonder: Your husband disappeared into a shady ass zoo for HOURS and you aren't suspicious?
They should have made a bad cop ending. If you ignore your wife, she gets suspicious and calls the cops.
If you don't talk to her AND don't call her when you're in the basement, the cops get called - maybe getting you arrested for trespassing or endangering animals or whatever (they're cop friends, they can probs do whatever the fuck Oliver wants them to do)
If you don't talk to her AND call her when you're in the basement, she decides against calling the cops
And if you talk to her in the beginning, she also doesn't call the cops.
I just wanted a persistent threat like in alien isolation. Having one good story where animals progressively get sick and chase you down while you fulfil the MSQ would have been pretty cool.
That AI is terrifying.
The fact if you use a solution too much the alien learns.
Like if to keep using noise makers the aliens will look to where it was thrown from. With the flame thrower the alien will at first flee it at first sight, but later will try to corner you when you have it out to see if you’re bluffing.
@@smolboi1222 I was playing that game at night for the first time in the section where you have the motion tracker but arent being attacked by the alien yet and my partner scared the SHIEEEET out of me and grabbed my shoulders while I was in-game huddling pathetically in a stairwell checking the motion monitor because I just didnt know the alien was scripted to not attack yet.
It took me years to go back and beat the game, but goddamn no other horror game has hit that height for me personally since then.
@
If you pay attention to details in the environment you can pick up that rather than most scripts where the alien is catching up to you - you are in fact catching up with the alien always arriving minutes or even seconds after it did. The perfect example is when you have to go in a vent for the first time and see that something JUST ran into that room because the light is swaying.
Tbh, I'm sort of hoping a more competent game team takes this idea and does better with it. It's really such a shame. I know that a very important person on the team passed during the creation, but they were apparently carrying the project. I had sort of mixed feelings about the game until I realized that you can find the cure and the MC DOESN'T USE IT ON HIMSELF.
@@bardofthe90s57 yeah its... something else for sure
number one immediate red flag for main character guy should be that you need a bachelors degree to even be a low level zookeeper lol
@@hyderflayer so many red flags and he just doesnt even question it lmao
To be fair, that could have been a funny gag about how some jobs have strange requirements for low-level work (it was a meme a while ago about how entry-level jobs were asking for a tonne of experience, my personal favourite being a guy who got rejected because he needed something like 3 years experience in a software that had only existed for 2 years...because he'd developed it). The main character could have acknowledged that it was stupid but he was willing to jump through those hoops because the job market was so trash.
@@AllyGatorAnimatorme working 20 years at nasa to have enough experience for McDonald's
Thats not really true. Plenty of zoos do not require zookepeers to have extensive zoological knowledge, as that can be handled by the managment and the overseers.
@@AllyGatorAnimator Or that time when a job ask you to be 20yo or younger, with 35 years of experience, lmao.
The second the NDA stated anything about not contacting the police I'm pretty sure it was rendered invalid.
literally like... they are NOT that strong
One of my favorite lets play videos of all time is Slimecicle’s Zoochosis playthrough. Because for the first half its him immersing himself in the story and gameplay but then the game’s flaws just slowly wear away at him until he out of character absolutely loses his shit and goes crazy. In the end he has to watch the ending on youtube because he fucked up one singular part of the parasite extraction and culminates in an absolutely desperate discord conversation with his friends about how bullshit the game is.
@@Slimewizard36 i imagine its pretty fun lol
I'm pretty sure parasite jumpscare by the gorilla enclosure wasn't originally in the game on release, as this is the first time I'm hearing about it. Most of what I've seen of the game is from UA-camrs playing it, & all the ones who covered Zoochosis on release never experienced that scene at all.
So it feeling useless makes sense; because it looks like it was added into the game after the initial waves critiques/reviews came out. They've made 20+ updates to the game so far, trying to save/improve the game, & I'd imagine that jumpscare was one of the attempts to improve the game from the state it was in on release.
Oh thats really interesting. I thought it was way more iconic since ive seen it in like, at least 5 peoples thumbnails lmao
@@SocksNeedsHelp If I'm not mistaken, a shot of the jumpscare was in the trailers, but wasn't actually in the game when it released, or at least during pre-release since some UA-camrs were given early access to the game.
It doesn't say anywhere specifically in 20+ patch updates for the game so far as to when they added it, but there is a chance it *was* in the game on release, but was broken & the moment didn't trigger, & was fixed by the time you played it. The footage you recorded yourself of the game features the newer design for the monsters' health from patch #16 & up. (Older versions of the game had three hearts for the monsters' health, which are the versions most of the big UA-camrs originally covered.)
The hallways not being safe is the same too. There was nothing in the first release
@@Sarcastic_Custard Wait, are the hallways *not* safe anymore?!?! That sounds like a genuine improvement I haven't seen anyone cover yet!
@@CartoonCreatureLover I heard it mentioned in the video, but thats all i've heard
My biggest disappointment was no constant danger. If you actually walked through the zoo with a trolly, and were occasionally pursued by an infected animal, it would be far scarier than the repetitive boss fights. I expected everything to be far more open than it actually was, and the small spaces to explore are really just a major disappointment that limited the possibilities of a scare.
Also, 27 endings, none of which require you to actually do your job and CURE the animals is insane. I’ve never liked when a game said “here’s a more difficult way to do things with no reward and no impact whatsoever”
yeah like, the feeling of running backwards with the trolley is really spooky until you realize that nothing's actually going to hurt you past a small jumpscare
the first scare of the boss appearing in the door made me laugh so hard oh my god 😭
right??? he just pops into existence like who wrote that
personally i feel sad that this game turned out how it did, because the trailers for it had it looking MUCH better than this, and way scarier too! but from what i understand the main creative force behind this game died, so sadly i think the original intent behind the game died along with him, leading to this instead of the promised game from the trailers, this poor game was a victim of rushed development after the loss of the main creator, leading to what had a good basis but turned into a bit of a mess as likely noone else had the same ideas in their minds as the guy who was behind the main idea 😢 the lack of instructions are also a bit problematic as it left multiple players completely lost, some even completely missing out on the possibility of the good ending by not knowing how to make the right medicine to cure an infected animal (as those require blood from the infected animal, which requires you taking multiple samples beforehand so you still have leftover blood after testing the samples to learn the disease)
@@julsdemers4740 yeah its so lame how unnecessarily complicated it is.
@SocksNeedsHelp yeah! honestly knowing this is what happened to such a wonderful looking project (based on the trailers) makes me more sad than anything? so much potential....
i honestly hoped this game wouldve played like Amnesia: The Bunker. travelling a zoo finding and curing infected animals, while infected ones could stalk you. i dont know i think having the gameplay of the bunker wouldve been awesome
When u get attacked by the mutated animals it accelerates the parasite in Paul. Thats why the bad end felt so abrupt if you didnt realise thats what was happening.
@lukekebell3146 i wish it would like, tell you that more accurately
@SocksNeedsHelp theres alot of things I wish this game was more clear on :(
I literally thought the game would be about monitoring the animals, keeping them alive, trying to figure out which one of them has been infected and trying to cure them before they mutate and you'd have to kill them. This is not what I signed up for
This isnt what anyone signed up for lmao
That is honestly far more thrilling, actually giving you some stakes, and making the Mini-boss fight far more devastating because "getting mutated" means "a guaranteed death" for the animal.
Also Oliver should give us a companion dog or something, one that we care about, one that he secretly knew is going to be mutated that soon no matter what just so that he can tell us "See, this is what happened if you slack on the job. Do you want the same fate to happen to other animals?"
“Why are you so jumpy” after you just spawned into reality
like bro really? you're going against the laws of physics and you expect me to be normal about it
I wanted to rip my ears off with the way some of the animals just scream non stop...I was like they obviously didn't do any research on how the actual animals act. Gorillas are very quiet
@@Shadowstorm612 right? The wallabt enclosure was driving me crazy
I am a quiet gorilla
The fact you know when you are and are not in danger is a big problem. For example, I played Silent Hill Shattered memories and realized early on I am in no danger unless the world freezes. So, 75% of the game, I was just wondering this not scary, dreary slog.
and at least that game's aesthetic is good LOL
Only having watched some youtubers play this game, the one thing I find interesting about it is that, as someone who briefly interned as a zoo keeper in college, nothing about this game is very accurate to how zoo keepers do there jobs, at least at the zoo I was at, which was a pretty good zoo. Keepers almost never enter an enclosure with a large animal, even something more docile like a giraffe, just because of how easily such a large creature could injure a human even by accident. And no one would EVER enter an enclosure with something like a moose or a hippo, because those things murder people real quick irl. There's a lot of smaller nitpicks I had as well, and that's not even necessarily a flaw for the game. Of course a shady zoo is going to have bad practices. Just something I thought about a lot. Anyway, great video!
See, I think better resouce management might have enhanced this game greatly.
For instance, what if you could keep track of how far along your own infection was. Maybe using a machine to see what percentage it's progressed. And when infected animals hit you, that percentage goes up. If it gets to 100%, you die/mutate and have to start over.
However, you can use limited resources to knock your infection rate down again, but by doing so you might not have enough to cure the animals. Ideally, a perfect run would be one where you cure them ahead of time/don't get hit and get to the good ending.
Mixed runs would be where you had to use a lot of the antidotes on yourself and could only save SOME of the animals.
Obviously, bad runs are where you fumble and either mutate too quickly or all the animals die.
@FrankenSoul yeah like i can maybe see why it wouldnt work for humans but why doesnt paul just use the cure you make for the animals on himself?
Something i dont see anyone talking abt; the player character seems to be mainly engaging in medical care (really the only other thing he does is feed them). From my understanding while zookeepers do assist in medical care, its the veterinary staff that typically diagnoses & determines treatment.
Given that this zookeeper is doubling as a night vet, the 100k/yr pay (not that anyone gets a chance to cash thise checks according to the lore) is actually in the average range.
@@carebear6798 still suspicious as hell
@SocksNeedsHelp especially since they aren't advertising it as a veterinary care position & text implies it's a high salary for the position!
The game is set in the 90s though
3:20 The rest of the game? That plot synopsis sounded like it could reasonably be the entire game, there's more game after that? Also "all they need is 3 lethal injections to defeat them" is an awfully pronounced video game moment. That the parasites won't harm each other makes it seem like the option of directly killing infected animal like that shouldn't have been available, due to being infected they won't hurt you but you also cannot directly harm them, but they will harm the other non-infected animals so as the acting keeper you still need to find a way to subdue them, making them a puzzle under pressure situation.
My favorite ending is the fastest one you can get. No spoilers, but it was very unexpected 😂
ah, the "wait at the start ending", like Far Cry 4
Tbh I already had my doubts before because zoochosis is an animal MENTAL illness, it has nothing to do with health or the game from what I know
@@KawaiiHamsteruwubean69 oh yeah i shoulda touched on that. I forgot that the name has nothing to do with the actual infection in game
@@SocksNeedsHelp there actually apparently is one connection to real Zoochosis, and it's that before they transform the parasite infected animals do infact exhibit some symptoms of actual Zoochosis.
it does have to do with health, though
mental health is just as important as physical, and they do affect each other
It seems from the trailers that the idea was the animals start exhibiting the usual symptoms of typical zoochosis, but then they start to escalate into abnormality and then monstrosity. But the pacing is so bad that any "zoochosis" symptoms you might possibly observe in the game are not noticeable and are immediately overtaken by the transformation happening three seconds later 😂
Zoochosis isn't real, lmao. It was made by anti zoo groups to paint all zoos as neglectful. It isn't an actual thing
I thought the entire game would play a little like papers please or that's not my neighbor, where you'd have to monitor the animals while caring for them, trying to figure out which ones were infected, for example if they wouldn't eat, had high temperature, and curing them before they mutate and kill you. I specifically avoided spoilers so I wouldn't know what exactly to look for and perfect the game on my first go. Then I hear about a giant monster and a story about you trying to kill that monster. You're telling me that I interpreted the entire game wrong from the beginning? Damn that's a disappointment.
I love the AI for the animals. One of their buddies is malformed into another monster entirely and they're just walking around like nothing's wrong :] wahoo more food!! Dw about Luna she's probably just. Hungry.
"That's just Brad. He just gets like this sometimes."
As someone who'd never heard of zoochosis before your mentions of it, this game looks so much like random shovelware you'd find on steam and i'm genuinely surprised they had some interesting mechanics and environments in there. It really feels like those weird 20 dollar chinese horror games with 23 reviews. Neat insight, and quite informative even as someone with no prior knowledge
for how high quality the mechanics and visuals are, they had so much going for them and just missed out.
i have an idea of how the game *could* have worked. granted, it wouldn't be called "Zoochosis", and the nature of the game would be more supernatural than scientific. actually, it could work as a separate game similar to Zoochosis.
premise is, the zoo that hired you has re-opened after a timespan ranging from 5 to 10 years. the zoo's been doing rather well, despite having less than a zoo its size could have (the place would be very big); but it does stand to have even more animals, and it's severely understaffed.
the owner requested particular animals for exhibits:
- Indian Leopard
- Bengal Tiger
- Asian Elephant
- Golden Eagle
- Reticulated Python
- Red Kangaroo
- Indian Cattle (don't know which species to choose)
- Maned Wolf
- Grey Wolf
- Wild Boar
- Elk
- Brown Bear
- Asiatic Lion
- Ibex
- (probably more)
this is where you come in: your job is to take care of the animals; feed, clean enclosures, etc. but something's... off. some of them are exhibiting unusual behaviour. some are abnormally big, some are of a different colour, some are constantly hungry... what's going on?
after some time, a loud sound echoes throughout the zoo. you hurry to investigate, and find one of the following animals, except... it mutated into a monster:
- Indian Leopard -> Panther (literally its name)
- Golden Eagle -> Roc
- Reticulated Python -> Dragon
- Red Kangaroo -> Hooroo
- Indian Gaur -> Forest Bull
- Maned Wolf -> Ahuizotl
- Grey Wolf -> Warg
- Wild Boar -> monstrous Boar (every monster boar of mythology has a unique name)
- Elk -> Wendigo
- Asiatic Lion -> Manticore
- Ibex -> Centicore/Yale
now, let me make this as clear as possible: i wouldn't know how they would become monsters; i was inspired by some of the "animals" of bestiaries, as well as folklore.
point is, your job as a zookeeper is to prevent the monsters from invading other enclosures (because bestiaries describe some of the monsters having an interaction with regular animals). or, for some of them - 3 of which being the Forest Bull, the Wendigo and the Manticore - your job is to isolate an kill them before they devour everything in their enclosure, and then escape and devour everything in the zoo, after which they'll attempt to escape and feed on the city.
it'd be possible to change them back, but the zoo could stand to have some more... special exhibits.
i tried my best; what do you think?
I think you should probably not be using native creatures as a gotcha when it's very obviously known you're not supposed to even say their name and most portrayals of them are whitewashed slop 💀
Sounds good, but the pop cultural idea of the hunger monster for the elk doesn't have any basis in tradition, as they're supposed to be human beings whose violation of taboo has turned them into monsters, so it doesn't match the theme as much as it appears. Perhaps the elk could be replaced with a mountain goat or bighorn sheep that turns into Krampus or another horned devil.
@@OrigamiPhoenix i know that the Elk transforming into a Wendigo makes little sense - said little sense being the modern interpretation of the monster wearing a Cervid skull and bugling like an Elk - but i already have the Warg as the wolf monster, and there are no Gorillas in America, so no Sasquatch.
as for the Mountain Goat becoming Krampus or a horned demon... NO. absolutely out of the question. they're *too* humanoid for my taste - and that's from the bloke who added the (modern) Wendigo.
both they and the Wendigo are demons ("daemonium" is Latin for "evil spirit", as part of the etymology of "demon"), but the latter is more animalistic (like the Werewolf and Sasquatch); and the setting is a zoo. i don't want monsters that are too humanoid for that kind of game; and just so you know, the Wendigo's already stretching it, and i'm aware of it.
@@jacktheomnithere2127 Yeah, that idea were no longer zoochosis...
But that sounds fun !!quickckck
Also to add, maybe instead of no reason, have the cure of said happening ARE ALSO the cause of it all.
Like, maybe the zoo made a unique, special ancient relic and artifact exhibit. Most of them are donated by rich people from all around the world (who bought those from black market) that even the original owner and seller actually have little to no knowledge about the capability or the origin of those artifacts are.
Have the start of the mayhem happened under a rare "blood moon" lunar eclipse.
Have a crazy dave, or a crazy man, yapping nonsense near the gate of your zoo for a full day every full moon, foreshadowing the events. Maybe have it so only the player can see him, maybe have him as a spirit guardian of certain relic that follow it but cannot enter the zoo unless "The keeper of the ground", the player, "Explicitly" invite him in.
Maybe you can take more inspiration from "Night at The Museum".
Maybe have it so that everything was actually under control, but something else that kickstart the mayhem happened, like a power outtage, and then some relic thieves breaking in and stealing some relic (we know this is very possible, lmao) only to be attacked when said relic are too far from its container or smt then transform a nearby animal, and have those thieves throwing those relics everywhere. So now you need to gather those scattered cursed relic quick and put them back in their container, or maybe exorcise them.
Maybe you can make your own twist on the lore.
We all know that manticore are always about lion-snake-something flying hybrid, but maybe this time make it accidentally mix some water animals like Hippo-alligator-shark.
So instead of your usual ferocious, flying, and venomous manticore, you would have this unstoppable amphibious juggernaut that can kill everything purely using its brute force.
Or instead of using lizard and reptiles as a base, an artifact transform some underrated bird into a dragon, maybe kassowari, camel bird, or a peacock.
And then have said dragon unable to fly and act more like a feathery T-Rex and instead of spitting fire, have them scream so loud and brutal it can rupture your inner organs and kill you that way.
Ofc i am not saying to make all of your monster deviate from the usual myth, but i am just saying that exotic zoo concept (e.g: Zoonomaly) is no longer unique so if you plan to make it stands out, make it reasonably different.
I mean imagine being chased by LRAD T-REX whose attack can bypass even the sturdiest bunker, or a hippopotamus hybrid that can kill you in one bite (note, normal hippo can already snap you in half). This would also incentivize you to take care of them quickly before they broke out of the zoo.
I think that's all from me, i already typed too much, lol.
I think the main reason that the body horror of the animals is so lacklustre is just their environments. You encounter them in large, open, well lit and relatively safe enclosures, with plenty of cover and paths you can use to escape and hide. Compare that to something like pony factory, where you encounter them in a pitch black maze of cramped industrial corridors, where they hide in every crevice and could be around any corner. You're forced to wield only one of your gun and flashlight at a time, which means you usually only see faint glimpses of the creatures jumping at you from the darkness in your muzzle flash, which makes even the basic enemy behaviour and simple models appear terrifying. The intricate and well done designs of the mutated animals just isn't done justice by their environment and lighting compared to more competent horror games
Yeah dark corners would definitely have helped with the fear factor but tbh, idk it it would be worth sacrificing the feeling of the enclosures tbat i find to be a good thinf about the game, actually
Speaking of when I mentioned Resident Evil earlier in this comment section, imagine if this kind of gameplay (blended with elements of RE7’s demos) was used to create a fan-game set in the RE universe, where you play as an Umbrella scientist working at the Arklay Mansion. To elaborate further below…
You start out as a newly recruited Umbrella scientist stationed at the Arklay Mansion. You start out being able to freely roam around and optionally enjoy the mansion’s various luxuries and leisurely activities. Once you answer the call to go down to the laboratory, you are told about a mutagenic virus Umbrella discovered, which can enhance an organism’s physiology. Your superiors claim that your assignment is to study the viruses enhancements and side-effects on different types of organisms, to see if the virus could be used to strengthen the human body against disease and traumatic injury. The organisms in question are fruit flies, spiders, sharks, a female adder snake, rats, Doberman pinschers, and even a newly discovered carnivorous plant species. Besides testing the virus, you’ll need to take care of the animals and plants, document their changes, synthesize lab chemicals, sequence mutated DNA, and write up your personal journal with a typewriter at the end of each day. Players could even be allowed to pet the dogs.
As the story progresses, you observe a mixture of changes. The bugs become supersized. The snake gradually grows in size and voraciousness, earns the nickname “Yawn” by eying scientists through the glass with her mouth open, and starts unexpectedly reproducing by parthenogenesis. The mammals start showing signs of necrosis and increased aggression, while fails to acquire the full augmentations. Soon, your character gets too nosey into places only authorized personnel are allowed access to and learns the full truth. The mutagenic virus is actually a modified variant made by Umbrella, in order to turn humans into super-soldiers and animals into weaponize-able monsters. Given that he has seen them, your character is not allowed to mingle with the lower-tier workers anymore and is threatened in a similar manner as the protagonist in “Zoochosis”. Soon, your duties expand to caring for the monstrous Hunters and Chimeras, including feeding live pigs to the former. As one Easter egg, one of your coworkers is heavily implied to be the writer of the Keeper’s Diary. If the player is thorough enough. Things react rock bottom, when the player character witnesses the human experimentation, namely some zombies, the prototype Crimson Head’s brief rampage, Lisa Trevor, and the development of the T-002 Tyrant.
Towards the final levels, the Mansion Incident occurs, with the T-Virus escaping containment, the U.S.S. putting the mansion in lockdown, the coworkers gradually turning into zombies, and the B.O.W. specimens breaking free from containment. At one point, another Easter egg can have the player overhearing a zombie, who attacks a character named Scott and moans, “Itchy… tasty”. As these events unfold, the gameplay slowing and seamlessly transitions into classic Survival Horror gameplay, where you have to collect weapons, find key items, manage limited ammo and medicinal items, and contend with almost all of RE1’s enemies/bosses. No matter what the player does, their character will not be able to escape alive, either succumbing to infection, being killed by a monster, or being shot by U.S.S. waiting outside the mansion. The only way for players to get a better ending is to explore as much of the RE1 locations as possible, collect as much evidence as they can, survive all encounters with the monsters, and store the evidence in a safe place. Achieving the latter will alive your character to posthumously help expose Umbrella, when the S.T.A.R.S. members later come across the journals and other evidence he collected.
At least its better than whatever was going on with "sparky marky"
Never heard of that
@@SocksNeedsHelpoh god. AI voices, probably an AI story, useless mechanics, and much more. It’s also got that unity/unreal sheen to it (I forgot what engine it was in)
@@moosenman I'm gonna assume "AI generated Garten of Banban" is an accurate abridged way of describing it
One thing that doesn’t make sense to me is when the infected animals get cured. Considering they transform in a ‘the Thing’ type way, when they get cured, there would be absolutely NO way they’d be alive after that. If they miraculously somehow still lived after that, they would either likely not live for too long, or like any normal zoo staff, the employees would put the animal out of its misery.
that always seemed silly yeah
big fan of this! you had good points, and I enjoyed hearing you explain everything. The game has soooo much potential, and i honestly would have loved a game where you knew what was going on, the animals were already mutated, you somehow find a cure, and watch the animals unmutate (to save some of the body horror lol). It would make interacting with the now-safe animals more meaningful, and give you a tangible "your actions are making a change" type of deal.
Anyways, you should play Bioshock if you haven't! It's a survival/horror with a fantastic story. I also dont do well with horror games, but i finished this one with my sanity. I think you would love it!!
Im glad you liked the video
This was a great video essay, and it never felt negative just for the sake of it, a problem I see a lot of other video essayists falling into. Looking forward to seeing more, glad I got recommended this.
Im so scared of coming off as too harsh lol
You can actually cure infected animals and save your wife by calling her. You can also temporarily revert infected animals by feeding them.
@@samuelrodriguez9801 however its extremely unclear since the game is so railroaded
@ you have to use the phone the one chance you have to use it.
watching the gameplay in the background like. that wouldn't pass inspection. we're not allowed to do that. why aren't the animals being shifted to different yards before you go in. WHY are you having free contact with a bachelor gorilla troop. god those pdas would be so handy. FREE CONTACT WITH HIPPOS!?
starting to think this place doesn't have AZA accreditation smh
@@sketchywyvern the fact the door stays open while you're in the enclosures is nuts. You dont need to be a zoo employee to know that's silly
One thing that bothers me about this game is why the protagonist is carrying a bodycam to a job that he took, not to investigate the suspicious activity, but to feed his family. Even more baffling is the fact that the boss just lets him bring the camera everywhere with him despite wanting to keep everything behind closed doors. He doesn't even question why the guy he just hired brought a camera with him to his first day of work!
If they wanted this to be a bodycam horror, the protagonist should've been an investigator like the woman we're supposed to rescue, not some destitute family man who's desperation leads him to stealing animal feed for supper.
he didn't though? the body cam was given to Paul so they could return the footage to the zoo's scientists. After we meet sara, the role of the camera changes to record all the wrongdoings of the zoo. I dont like this game as much as the next person but this isnt one of the things that was wrong with it haha
Honestly I’d preferred if we couldn’t cure the animals that soon. Maybe around animal 3-4 we could after going deeper into the zoo. The first few animals are in the zoo, roaming and looking for live prey now. Imagine knowing a giraffe or a zebra roaming, looking for the newest employee that they saw just an hour ago, still smelling them in the zoo.
yeah, make the hub not safe either
if you want to work in an actually scary zoo with monsters after you, you could just work in customer service
Real
This was one of the more insightful and in depth looks into the game that I've seen so far! I've heard the buzz around Zoochosis and also its downfall, but I haven't played the game myself and I was curious. I think you should continue along the video essayist route as you seem quite talented at it! Though I may be biased because I only come to UA-cam FOR its video essays haha
@Ficus1493 hey i appreciate it. Ill try to get more smaller stuff like this out
Zoochosis,, what a missed opportunity. I wanted to have hope, but considering this is the same studio that made Sparky Marky, I was careful with my expectations ^^;; It really sucks that they lost their creative director. Back when the trailers first came out, I bet that was his vision. It's sad Clapperhead didn't take the time to try and bring that vision to life :[ I know release dates and deadlines are tough, but I feel like the general public would have understood.
On another note: This is the first video of yours I've ever watched, and I had no idea you weren't a variety commentary UA-camr! You're very well-spoken and your descriptions and points were easy to follow along with- and your voice was very nice to listen to lol. Overall a very good video and I'm super glad I clicked. I've never played Risk of Rain but I'll have to give your other stuff a peek. 10/10 would watch again :]
Thanks! Im already working on more non ror2 stuff since yall liked this so much so you'll have that to look forward too.
Zoochosis may be the biggest disappointment in gaming for me, I was so excited for it, I'm glad that I was too busy the week it came out. So I saw the fallout of it before I bought it.
@@goddessbraxia wish i could say the same lol
@SocksNeedsHelp I'm sorry. heres hoping you at least dodged Battleborn 8 years ago. that was the second biggest disappointment. but that one caught me sadly
I did, thankfully
@@SocksNeedsHelp Im glad
as someone with an interest in infectious diseas and virology they really didnt put much into which diseases to use. like- like meningitis is a severely infectious illness, the chances of only one animal in an enclosure having it and showing symptoms to begin with is low, but why is it just a shot to fix it when the actual treatments for meningitis (not taking into account different varieties of said illness) involve isolation and several routes of treating it, not just a quick shot and calling it a day. it feels really single note and i wish more attention had been paid to the illnesses and treatments.
I think really if you want a version of this game that actually relies on horror you’d have to stick with either subtle storytelling or less task-based gameplay. I’ve had such severe brainrot over what this game could’ve been that I’ve tried reworking it to see if I can find any way to redeem the storyline (though my version cuts out a lot of characters, and the Mother).
You still play as Paul Connelly, working at Pine Valley Zoo in order to help support your wife and daughter, although you are a trained exotic animals veterinarian. You’ve been brought in from a different zoo to help treat sick animals, as this particular zoo seems to consistently have issues with its animals becoming unwell. You meet your boss, who ensures that your vaccinations are in order, before mentioning that you need a specific vaccination as there’s a possibility that you’ll be working with penguins, and you agree. After signing the contract, you’re led to a professional-looking laboratory/veterinary clinic and given your ‘vaccine’ (which obviously, like the game is an injection of a parasite, although not one that’s so alien like).
You begin the gameplay on Monday, and this portion of the game is tutorial-based, as in-game, your boss wants to see whether or not you will prove to be a reliable asset to the zoo, and most importantly to curing the animals, by allowing you to learn game mechanics by treating birds, such as lovebirds and parrots. I’d use the tutorial section to set up the seedy nature of employers towards the animals there - seeing these types of animals as disposable. The game mechanics specifically would be similar to those already in the game: seeing if the animals are eating, taking temperatures, and taking blood and fecal samples, but with a change - when an animal is flagged as being sick, the play has to work out whether the illness is bacterial, viral, or parasitic based on the samples already gathered, or new tasks that will narrow down the diagnosis. As the tutorial progresses, the player would be able to treat Birds of Prey, and during this section of the tutorial, the animals begin to show symptoms of zoochosis (linking the gameplay to the name) as their enclosures are clearly not stimulating enough for them, although the player character doesn’t initially register this as a potential cause of the illnesses.
Days 2 and 3 (Tuesday and Wednesday) would be where I’d have the gameplay begin to pick up, with your character being able to treat small mammals, such as meerkats, fennec foxes, and red pandas. The player continues checking the animals’ health, noting the symptoms of zoochosis, until they find a meerkat female displaying unusually heightened levels of aggression, even partaking in self-mutilation. When the player runs tests, the animal presents as having some form of infection, that has physical symptoms that match a bacte infection, but the animal’s behavioural symptoms make no sense with the diagnosis - the player character even considers the possibility of the animal suffering from some level of zoochosis. Treating the animal anyway, the player finishes their tasks for the day.
Wednesday opens with the player returning to the meerkat’s cage, only to find that the meerkat has killed multiple of its cagemates. Here the player has to involve their boss, who, if the player chooses to bring up the conditions the animals are kept in, will dismiss it, and say that their enclosures have been approved by quote unquote ‘specialists’. The boss then captures the meerkat, and implies that they’re taking it to have it put to sleep, telling the player that sometimes things like this happen, and if the general public knew what a cruel and vicious place the animal kingdom really was, then they’d never even dream of visiting zoos, making a final comment that the player has otherwise shown good capability, and will be allowed to begin curing a section of the zoo of their choice - told to pick an area they specialise in. You continue your day, although the small mammals seem to be acting more aggressively towards you than usual, and as night falls, you swear that you feel as if they’re hunting you, or at least, something lurking in the dark is. As the player exits from the final enclosure, they catch a glimpse something much bigger than the animals they’ve been looking after so far, something with too many eyes, too many legs, the sound of breathing strangely disjointed, as if whatever this creature is breathing from two mouths. As quickly as this encounter starts, it’s over, leaving both the character and the player confused and baffled as what just happened. Once the player returns to the veterinary centre, they’re given a choice as to which area of the zoo they wish to focus on from four options: Big cats, Apes, Savannah animals, and Arctic animals.
Thursday gameplay occurs the same as Tuesday and Wednesday gameplay - there are multiple sick animals, with one or two presenting with symptoms of zoochosis, alongside other symptoms, leading to the player not being able to diagnose what the animals are suffering from acutely enough to treat them. They bring this up to their boss, who tasks them with the task of trying to identify the source of this infection, and potentially produce a cure, but of course as the character is only an exotic animals vet, this requires abilities beyond their skillset. They stay longer, tasked with studying the creatures’ behaviours over the course of Thursday to Saturday but are free to explore more behind the scenes areas of the zoo, which, if done thoroughly enough, will lead to the player finding clues and notes that point to what is actually going on (the zoo is actually an undercover animal testing facility, bio-engineering a pathogen/parasite that can induce psychotic behaviour in both humans and animals. The people testing the pathogen need to see how animals infected respond to people, how well the parasite spreads, and whether there’s any human/animal transmission. The vaccine you were given at the start of the game was actually the parasite, and as the game progresses, the effects of this manifest.) Each day, the player is given a new set of animals to care for, and at night, the infected animals become hostile towards the player, mutating into grotesque versions of themselves seen in the game. The player has to navigate surviving these mutations, collecting samples from them, as well as testing the other animals in order to find some sort of vaccine or cure to the parasitic infection. There are times that the player should begin to question whether or not the mutations are real or if the player is taking the route of working out what’s going on in the zoo, whether they’re just a side effect of their own infection.
Saturday is the final day of the game, and the one where the player must face the most hostile/dangerous animal in their chosen specialty. The night mode is especiall hard, as the other mutations they’ve had to deal with have escaped from their enclosures - the player is being stalked through a dark zoo at night, with no clear way to dispatch or fight back against the horrific animal abominations chasing them, with a plan for a cure that either has no effectiveness or has the possibility to put an end to this animal testing nightmare, depending on the player’s level of knowledge. The game ends with the player injecting themselves with the cure, resulting in a ‘good’ or a bad ending.
In the bad ending, the player is not cured, and is forced to watch their own body transform into something Lovecraftian, not even human, as their body succumbs to the infection.
In the ‘good’ ending, the player is able to cure themselves, and sets out to cure the afflicted animals, but is prevented by their boss, who applauds them, and offers them a choice: they can either join their team of researchers, and contribute to the animal testing, which while goes against the character’s moral code, would provide them with enough of an income that their family can live comfortably, or the boss will be forced to kill them. If the player chooses to join the researchers, the game ends with the player given a small insight into the true exent of the underground operation. If they refuse, the boss leaves them to the infected animals, which are not shown to be either simply psychotic animals, or truly the grotesque mutations seen earlier in the game.
That’d be my idea for zoochosis!! Feel free to let me know what you think in the replies!!
i think the only thing with the jumpscares is that it locks you out of the good ending if you get got ""too much"" due to several things that can happen. one of them is sara is scared of how infected you are and locks you in a bathroom. theres another one i dont remember, but ive also heard that its unclear how much is ""too much"" for the animal attacks. Still lame and unscary though unfortunately, especially since getting new endings requires you to fully replay the game and most people wont want to do so.
edit: watched a little further, thats why you got that ending i believe.
spoilers if you dont want to know the way to get the good ending;
to make sure you arent hit too much and of course collect the parasites. i dont think curing the animals matters at all lol. save sara and all that, warn your wife with the phone about the food and then she wont be there for the man to kill, iirc
couldn't personally play the game because i am sensitive to animal harm (which i thought was gonna happen from the trailer) so thanks for this amazing review!
@bea-the-boo it was def not worth it yeah. Thanks!
I really liked this actually!!! Really outlines what the issues are with the game. I am curious if you had an alternative version of the game? Like an idealized version if you got to make Zoochosis (hope this makes sense haha!)
I dont know, i dont ever want to claim that i could do better than them or anything. I just think if they let go of rhe chore aspect a bit and leaned into the story a lot more it would have been way more fun
I can't believe this is your first video essay, you did so well! I definitely want to make my own videos more organized/planned out, it's just so time consuming and I have so much else on my plate that it's hard to find the energy to even try. But you've given me inspiration to try anyway. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Well, I've made video essays before and watch a ton of them, this is just the first one I've made of this like, commentary style
This is my first time seeing a video of yours, and the first thing I did afterwards was look for more video essays from you. I personally am always looking for more videos like these, and would be interesting in seeing more of these from you
@yellowdog5478 thats the plan!
I wish they could've had things work slower with the mutations of the animals. I know they probably rushed it out after the creative director passed away, but they could've put more polish on it.
I wish you could have seen it on screen lol
Honestly because Moose are able to swim, how come they didn't add a chase scence where the moose swims after the player. Also Gorillas don't make much noise, I imagine the gorilla that is mutated to be more like a tiger and it crawls at you slowly when you aren't looking,
@ItzCrystalKibutsuji they couldve done a lot of things lol but they just missed on every mark
@SocksNeedsHelp Fr though, plus most animals that are quiet don't make much noise. I hate that when the player gets near the infected animal, it constantly roars when most of the animals, including the wallaby irl, are usually animals that don't make as much noise, Zebras do make sounds but not as much. And they could have a scene to show how the animal mutated in the first place, and then the mutated animal starts to slowly stalk the player when they aren't looking. It's just a suggestion I have about making the game a lot better. And because elephants are pretty smart, I'm sure the infected 🐘 would immediately find an item, and smack the player with it as a jumpscare.
20:09 actionable pun detected
i mean i GUESS
That's a kek W reference there gamer
THANK YOU for providing positive points and praise, far too many essay videos slide into slander and negativity with 0 acknowledgement of what the game did do well. It really improves the quality of videos like this and curates a healthier mindset and audience. Good job!
@@admiral_m_10k35 yeah i get that too. So many people just hating without recognizing what it does right
Just discovered your channel with this video - personally, I look forward to more videos like this one from you! If you're interested in the subject matter and you enjoy making the video, I'm sure you won't go wrong.
thanks!
What really kills the horror is the fact that everything happens within a single night.
No build up, no subtle foreshadowing to something deeper, scarier, and horrific. Just BAM human meat BAM you're infected BAM the animals are turning BAM the Mother BAM the parasites BAM you're mutating. You don't get attached to the characters or even the animals. It's just "oh well I guess that wallaby is gone RIP. anyways."
Also, really odd they included lines about it being odd for there to be a lab or scientist at a zoo. Both are essential when taking care of animals because they need to make pharmaceuticals and be able to monitor the health of the animals. Zoologists are scientists in the field of animals after all, and all zoos need them to help out. I was so confused when Doc said there wasn't a lab of any kind.
Pacing is the most important foundation for storytelling and Zoochosis had the pacing of a wild hamster on a wheel. Everything is a blur and a bore, all that matters is doing what you're doing until you're dead. Stretching out the story to across several days, maybe a week or two would really help in the build-up and anticipation of "when will an animal turn and which will it be?". It would also give players a chance to become friendly and familiar to the animals, adding a bit of despair when they do turn and a motivation to keep the animals healthy.
The PDA system for story also only really works in incredibly large environments like in Subnautica. In a heavily limited space like the zoo, the story benefits more from social interactions with maybe a few tidbits of PDAs that the players might have to sneakily copy data from later in the story. It'd probably make more sense to be working with the people like CJ and Sarah, only for them to randomly vanish after a while, giving Paul incentive to investigate and go against the zoo halfway.
Just found this video, and i wanna say, i really like your voice, its nice to listen to :3
@@agrimmlock6853 thanks!
First video of yours ive seen but it was solid, definitely keep doing these
Idk how many more like, negative commentary videos ill do, but ill try
@SocksNeedsHelp don't have to be negative! I just meant video essays about games! I watched your Edith finch one that was mostly positive, and it was very solid too!
Yup the game may have failed but at least it was unique and that is something that is missing.
Eh, unique doesnt really equal good unfortunately
awesome work, and to quell your fears, this is not slop content. I also loved the video essay
Glad you enjoyed it!
6:27 i think if you get knocked over enough you get turned into a monster, i watched someone else play (slmccl) and he was going for the good ending the second time around (curing all the animals and finding the female parasite), and got turned into the full monster after "ignoring the symptoms" of the parasite, blah blah blah, he ends us killing the director and the girl and the end.
yeah its kinda lame tho cuz it doesnt really tell you that
@@SocksNeedsHelp yeah, i was kinda disappointed in the game a little bit, but it was mostly hidden by the actual creator because he tried to make the game play as engaging as possible. it was funny yet tragic when he realized after his second playthrough that the only reason he didn't get the good ending the first time was because he accidentally clicked on a male parasite💀
when i first saw the game i thought we were gonna prevent the animals from being infected not... boring boss fight...
Yupp same
I would love to see more of these!! I just found your channel and I'm always eager for a great analysis 🥰
Thats the plan!
One thing I don't understand is how is it possible for the animals to get cured
Like... the gorillas get split in HALF, the zebras get so messed up their digestive system gets turned upside down however when you cure them they go back to just how they were before, they don't even have any short of scar. It would have been ten times more interesting if the first parasitic animal escapes and all animals are in danger of getting infected too so you have to be running around the zoo bewaring of the mutated animal while trying to vaccinate the others so they don't mutate and also take them to safety and if one gets infected then there is no way to save it aside of putting an end to its misery so it doesn't create more infecteds, it would also get rid of the plot holes related to Paul because for how he is presented it just seems like your average "company is evil and corrupted mwahaha" kind of guy that does things just because he is so evil.
"Nah I'd live": zoo edition fr.
Great video thanks for putting all the work in to edit and write this!
I will say I watched it on stream with a silly streamer and the whole game just seemed frustrating and janky.
its a bit better after the various patches, but it's still super janky yeah. thanks!
"Brightest bulb in the shed"
is great!
Hehe yeah
There is a certain way in which games that have a very set formula, such as the zookeeping tasks here, need to break that formula early and often to be effective. Its not always the case, but definitely for horror it benefits from establishing the normal flow of the game, and then disrupting that flow. The zookeeping busywork should have been leveraged to make the player feel secure, oh this is just regular tasks im fine, and then disrupted to throw them off balance and destroy their sense of security. Carefully building up that sense of normalcy, of safety, and then taking it away in unpredictable ways is in my opinion the key to this kind of horror. In this game though, the infected animal just appears in a hallway each time. Its predictable, normal. Youre never put in the position of having to guess what might happen next, never have your feeling of safety eroded by the unpredictability of the horror.
I havint watched you're content before but i loved this video as a video essay and would love more
this is the first video I’ve seen from you and I think your coverage of any games you’re passionate about would be interesting to see :D
Well hey if you want to see me talk about some game I like, you can check the pinned comment! Thanks!
What made this game entirely funny for me was the person's reliance on the word "damn"
A cool idea that I think would've made the game a bit better would've been a hard mode. In it, you would play the game uninfected and if you got too close to an infected animal, it would immediately transform. I also would've added some carnivores to the animal line-up like polar bears, lions, and crocodiles to give a believable reason as to why meat was included for the animals. It would've also made things morally challenging to the player/character when it is revealed what kind of meat is being used.
the meat being humans really feels like just the games attempt to be edgy lol
As an even newer and smaller UA-camr, I thought this vid was great! Definitely want more commentary! Looking forward to seeing what you explore. ❤
Im glad you liked it!
Personally I am the opposite, for me the game was REALLY easy to figure out. To the point of extreme boredom. Just choose all the options that don't help you directly.
I was able to use the medicine after the second try because I was like "oh I just have to find the commonality" and THEN I was like "OHHHHH I need BLOOD" and then I got the good ending on accident my second playthrough
If I could do an endless mode of JUST the animal disease curing, with more complex gameplay, better puzzles, and Paul doesn't speak a damn word I would, but thats not the game I got. So I had an alright time, and I thought the monsters were badass
But it wasn't very scary.
It's a shame. The game had real potiental, and the monster designs are really unique and intresting. I heard that the creative director and story writer died, and you can kinda tell when playing when they lost him. The quality definitely shifts
The antagonist: Hey buddy if a woman calls you to say something about her husband don't pay atention to her she is just crazy everything here is pretty normal
Me: Ok
LITERALLY LESS THAN 30 MINUTES OF GAMEPLAY AFTER
The Antagonist: Hey buddy i sent you a woman to turn her into animal food
Me: WHY WOULD YOU BOTHER TRYING TO MAKE THINK EVERYTHING HERE IS NORMAL IF YOU WERE GOING TO ASK ME THIS!!! IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE
literally lmao
This was good!!! I subscribed, and I look forward to what you may make in the future :D
Im glad you liked it! I have another video on mouthwashing if you're interested :)
OOO… gonna go check that out now~! >:D
Honestly, the game had the potential to be challenging if the animals weren't so docile (have you seen what a panicked gorilla can do to a human or the injuries a hippo can inflict on someone trespassing on its territory). Imagine trying to cure the animals while the others are p*ssed at you for running up to them and trying to inject them with no context of how the infection works.
What I don't like about the cure is that the animals that have been mangled by the transformation magically return to normal instead of screaming in agony and dying once they gain consciousness and the pain kicks in (it undermines the body horror aspect)
@@SebastienGendron-uk4po literally like why are they just fine when cured lil
@@SocksNeedsHelp It's like the Walking Dead cure hypothesis. If a cure were to be discovered, it would only work for people who have been infected recently and not eaten alive and turned into zombies. Those missing limbs lost blood, and hanging organs aren't going to magically fix themselves 😅🤣
I thought it was weird how many ads I was getting for a game that looked like some kind of indie title.
@DangStank right? Its almost suspicious tbh.
I agree with most of your points, and I really feel like this game could have been so much more. But, unless the devs changed it in an update since Slmccl's playthrough I watched, I feel like your criticisms on the animal cures isn't really fair? As long as you've scanned all the animals and have their symptoms, you can toggle the symptom buttons above the diseases panel on the diagnosis tab and it will show you the right one. I'm pretty sure there's only one disease for each symptom combo. To be fair to you, if you were going mostly off of the descriptions for the medicines and diseases, I see where the devs may have dropped the ball. Still, I don't think the devs are forcing you into making a wrong decision, they really just have made a few bad choices in teaching the player how the system works.
She did say she had no idea what the scanner dohicky did.
i think the small bad choices add up
well, they dont tell you unless you look for it. its also not related to anything in real life so you cant really blame me
@@SocksNeedsHelp I definitely agree with that. I just think that there is an important difference between a game forcing you into making errors, and a game that fails to explain critical mechanics. One is a basic game design problem, and the other is more an indication that they didn't have much playtester feedback.
It feels like they kinda forced it out because they lost interest in it after the one team member passed away (it seems like maybe he was the one with all the passion for it) and the voicelines feel very... empty. They don't have a lot of emotion in it.
Also my god I wish they toned down the vomiting scenes, it's so off-putting and makes my emetophobia flare up so I have to skip through pieces of gameplay everytime via the 10 sec skip ahead on mobile.
Also i think the sick animal is always fully healthy, but mimicks the behaviors of the sick ones (making weird noises, spooking easily, vomiting, but all whilst having perfect vitals).
I wish it was like a multi-day multi-night thing, i feel like we would bond with the animals more
ALSO THERES HOW MANY ENDINGS?????
@@cawingcrows2072 yeah they shouldve held onto it for way long
@@cawingcrows2072 too many!
The biggest issue I have with this game is just that it feels blatantly unfinished. Not 5 minutes into the first playthrough I watched on it, and there were already multiple jarring cases of poorly timed dialogue, namely overlaps, and iirc one time where a part of the previous line's caption get repeated, but not the actual line (though idk which would bother me more). I really wish we could see what this game could've been like if they put another 6 months or so, maybe another year even, into just generally polishing things up even if not improving/expanding the actual gameplay.
There have been over 20 updates since then. Its a lot cleaner now.
Imagine if we saw infections animated. I’d ignore the rest of the bad parts if we got that shock value.
I think what also takes away from the game is that you can't lose your animals, it's incredibly easy to save them and they just straight-up return to their healthy versions because of a few injections. The players' attachment to them should be capitalized on, there should be some time pressure and some animals should be extremely hard to save or impossible to cure. They mutate to the point of being split in half, at least let them be mutated and disabled/suffering when you do save them. It takes away the immersion to have them be cured so easily.
and even if you do kill them there isn't any punishment i believe
@SocksNeedsHelp I believe a lot of tiktoks (I'm not sure if the official zoochosis one posted) promised that choosing which animals to save would impact the ending/gameplay, but it really just... doesn't. I was hoping for a time limit, maybe training the animals to run/fight, having to sacrifice some, etc. But I guess they were too afraid to kill animals in a game that was supposed to be an animal zombie plague.
I really like the infected animal designs but unfortunately without seeing the transformation it doesnt actaully make you scared. I look at them and think "hm neat" and thats it.
yeah same