Tokyo Jungle feels like a roguelike invented by someone who never heard of roguelikes

polygon.com:

Some games have a concept so good that the execution doesn’t really matter. Tokyo Jungle is about animals — exotic zoo animals, household pets, farm stock, and forest wildlife — fighting for survival and dominance in an overgrown, post-apocalyptic Tokyo, long after the complete disappearance of humankind. That is one of the greatest gaming elevator pitches of the 21st century, no question.

The PlayStation 3 game that sprang from this idea in 2012 is exactly as harsh, comical, and strange as it should be (and it’s now available to stream with PlayStation Plus Premium). It is not, by any stretch, a masterpiece of game design or technology. But it is a brilliant idea that has been realized in a completely unfiltered way, which makes it, if anything, even more precious.

Tokyo Jungle was made by Crispy’s!, an inexperienced indie studio, under the wing of Sony’s Japan Studio and PlayStation Studios’ then-president, Shuhei Yoshida. It’s a weird mixture of slick, corporate production and naive outsider art, with endearingly clashing aesthetics. The flashy, score attack-style interface and insistent background techno music seem to hail from an early 2000s fighting game. Meanwhile, the crudely textured models seem to be going for a blurry, bleached, primitive sort of realism.

Structurally, in the main Survival mode, Tokyo Jungle plays like a kind of arcade roguelike invented by someone who’d never heard of roguelikes. You choose your animal — at first, only yappy little Pomeranian dogs and fragile sika deer are available — and begin the hunt for food while avoiding bigger predators. Time races by at terrifying speed; a year passes every few minutes and your hunger gauge is constantly plummeting. Death is always near, and it