Zoochosis was provided by Clapperheads for review. Thank you!
This review was created using an LCD Steam Deck. OLED testing will be carried out at a later date.
Zoochosis is an intriguing little game. I like animals more than most humans, and a horror zoo simulation game grabbed my attention. Unfortunately, it is that unpleasant mix of great ideas and middling execution. It is a shame because the game’s atmosphere has some potential. However, I believe Zoochosis has a worthy player experience, although I recommend waiting for a deep sale before diving in.
Zoochosis isn't your average zoo simulator. Favoring a bodycam, from a first-person point of view, you take on the role of struggling father Paul, who is applying for the lucrative role of a zookeeper at a mysterious reserve called Pine Valley Zoo. With economic turmoil threatening the future of his family, Paul needs this job to secure a healthy life for his wife and daughter and is determined to go along with the job, even as things deeply go to shit.
I appreciate how they approached the mechanics, although they could be better implemented. These could have been tutorial prompts, but players have an immersive way of learning how to play instead. Even with the game’s short runtime, I preferred this approach. For instance, when I failed to tranquilize the sick giraffe, I expected to have to repeat the attempt. Instead, Oliver finished the training, citing how he could not be bothered to tell me again. That made me laugh, even when I wanted to shoot him with the gun. Sadly, the game would not let me.
While the game's visuals are average, the creepy sound design and the oppressive lighting sell the mood of the place. I noticed some severe voice clipping in dialogue, as the characters responded to each other almost before the other finished their sentence. However, I liked the Doctor’s character: an impatient, passionless asshole that belittles you.
Despite the short runtime, Zoochosis's mechanics are quite detailed. Players have plenty to do during their trial night, including carrying food into the cart by hand, pulling it along tram tracks, storing it inside the train, chopping ingredients, and caring for the animals.
Caring for the animals involves making sure they have the correct food, sucking up their feces with the handy vacuum and storing it for analysis, keeping an eye on their temperature with the heat gun, correctly diagnosing their illnesses, and injecting them with the proper medications to keep them ‘healthy.’
If the animals get out of control, you must fight them into submission, which is quite a challenge given your limited tools. While it was clunky with little room for error, I appreciated how realistic it felt. Paul is a zookeeper, not a marine.
The tension and narrative of Zoochosis ramp up fast, and it becomes clear that this is a terrible workplace. Strange monsters climbing through walls, wild critters jumping out, and frantic phone calls about missing coworkers are some of the treats awaiting you. I don’t like the jump scares as a horror mechanic, but some moments made my flesh crawl.
For instance, I was ordered to bring in a fresh ‘supply’ of meat to be chopped up. That turned out to be a live, naked woman whose sedatives wore off by her screaming for help. Oh, and the Doctor has you injected with a parasite from some abomination called ‘The Mother’. It’s pretty unsettling, and Paul has to work with an outside journalist to work on a cure and expose Oliver’s horrific crimes.
Zoochosis can be completed on a short weekend, and I appreciate it for not drawing things out past their welcome. The story did not surprise me at any point, but there are multiple endings to discover. Sadly, I got one of the bad endings. Players can only access the one good ending by curing all the sick animals, which makes sense. However, because of the game's autosaves, there is no way to return to a previous point, so players will need to start another game to see if they can get a different ending. While autosaving makes sense in short games, I do wish there were manual saves so I could go back to get a different ending without needing to restart entirely.
There aren’t any shortcuts, and the slow animations of accessing an interface, collecting and chopping food, depositing inventories, and moving the cart along the rails pad out the game far more than necessary. I like immersive games, but when that immersion is in the way of enjoying the game, I feel it’s a problem. I felt no desire to start a new game once I finished.
While I enjoyed Zoochosis' atmosphere, the gameplay felt like it was stumbling over its own feet. Despite the game’s handful of hours, most of that is taken up by the pacing of animations, which is plodding to the point of boring. That is probably the point because working in a zoo of horrors while trying to survive isn't riveting. Still, I grew increasingly frustrated with how long it took to complete anything.
In fairness, developer Clapperheads has been steadily improving the game since its launch with patches and content updates, but there is still a fair bit of jank to contend with. Most of these bugs were oddities like animals clipping through terrain or each other, floating objects, and the audio bugs I mentioned earlier. When moving into an animal enclosure, I had one infinite loading screen and a hard crash that forced me to reboot. While I only lost 20 minutes of progress, the lack of manual saving and tedious player actions made getting back to where I was more frustrating.
I also encountered a couple of navigation issues. This was more prevalent in the training montage, but the dark environments sometimes made it difficult to find what I needed.
Finally, the game needs more content. Zoochosis has some impressive management mechanics that could be applied to a free-play mode. The gameplay has a lot of depth, but the short story length is almost a detriment. I would like to see some free-play additions to the game, as it would add much-needed replayability. Its current offerings make it hard to justify the $25 price tag.
While Zoochosis is playable on the Steam Deck, I found it a woeful player experience. Things get off to a bad start on the main menu. The game is locked to 30FPS automatically, with no options to change that in the settings. Furthermore, no graphical options are showing on the Deck. Whatever performance you have is what you can get, which is even more unfortunate when the game struggles to hit 30 FPS, even without any limits.
I found this baffling, given that the graphical settings are present in the PC version and that a patch in November was said to have improved the Steam Deck performance. I tried various things to get it to show up, including reinstalling the game, changing Proton versions, and adding the "SteamDeck=0 %command%" launch option in Properties. None of these attempts worked, which is unfortunate. I’m unsure what is happening, and perhaps someone else will have better luck than I did.
With few options available, I had limited choices on how to proceed. That doesn’t mean that Zoochosis is entirely unplayable, as the standard controls worked great, and I could still play through the game.
The power drain still surprised me, given how much the Steam Deck struggled with the game. I was pulling over 20 watts on average, which translated to less than 2 hours of battery life. I tinkered with TDP settings to find a decent battery life without sacrificing too much performance. Limiting the TDP with a 40hz refresh rate averaged around 20 FPS during gameplay while keeping the battery draw around 14 watts. This improved battery life significantly, but the performance drop is too steep to recommend.
So, the best way to experience the game is without changing anything. It is playable, but it won't particularly be enjoyable.
Zoochosis is available in English, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish - Latin America, Turkish, Ukrainian, Spanish - Spain, Arabic, and Portuguese - Portugal. However, only English has full voice acting right now.
Players can toggle nudity, subtitles, bodycam, sprint mode, and auto-aim. You can adjust the brightness, toggle colorblind mode, change controller vibration, change gamepad sensitivity, and toggle the invert look vertically or not.
Zoochosis is a polarizing game as the reviews on the Steam Store suggest. It is an enjoyable horror sim with a great atmosphere. There are some truly disturbing moments throughout its story, and it puts quite the twist on a zoology game. I wish we had more games around managing zoos, and the developers have put a lot of heart into creating it.
Unfortunately, the ponderous gameplay and overall janky nature have brought down my enjoyment of the game. My shoddy experiences of Zoochosis on the Steam Deck do not help that. The mechanics are surprisingly in-depth for a bodycam game, but the short story means we do not have enough time to enjoy those mechanics without some free-play mode.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Zoochosis is a disturbing zooology horror game with some great atmosphere and mechanics. Slow animations and jank brought down the experience for me unfortunately, and the Steam Deck performance is rough.
