It’s quite hard to draw out what Looped is really trying to say about relationships, if anything. This new miniature adventure published by Studio Hamlin is fluffy and wordless, with a certain amount of charm to its lightly interactive play, but the bones of it are a bit weak, and it’s over in a flash. It’s priced to move and features a pair of cute anthropomorphic dogs, but its repetitive music, lack of responsive gameplay, and lighter-than-air tone never meaningfully surpasses the surface-level love story at its core, relegating it as more of a restless toy than a substantive storytelling game.

Looped is presented as an animated black and white comic with occasional splashes of color, and its cute grumbling cast is immediately adorable. These two svelte wolf-like dogs — one clad as a kind of classic horizontal-stripe-shirted Frenchman, the other wearing ballerina tights and pointe shoes — encounter each other when the male gets sucked into a portal, and they fall in love at first sight.

Some Dusty Relationship Dynamics

Looped's Pair Of Lovers Never Push The Envelope

It’s the first of a few odd romantic themes that make Looped feel quaint at best, slightly regressive at worst. Essentially, a woman with a disappointing phone job is thrilled when a man magically manifests in her house. She can’t wait to clock out to see him, to share their grounded life of relationship bliss, and her unemployed beau falls into a homemaker role. Overall, the two seem quite happy together.

Absent any dialogue, Looped ’s narrative takes the silent film approach, albeit with sound effects and occasional dog groans.

The male dog in Looped has some manner of scientific background, arriving with a journal filled with equations and sketched diagrams of a rocket ship. Eventually, the ballerina happens upon a shady character selling rocket fuel, rushing home to design the spacecraft and help her partner fulfill his malnourished dreams.

Absent any dialogue, Looped’s narrative takes the silent film approach, albeit with sound effects and occasional dog groans. The few characters are seemingly animated by hand, but with plenty of expressive body language and gestures, so the simple story is always easy to follow along, though its explosive ending is frustratingly ambiguous.

A Few Clicks And It's Over

Looped's Gameplay Never Draws Players Into Its World

Looped’s gameplay doesn’t necessarily add coherence, though. Less of an adventure, much of the game becomes a hidden object experience, though most screens only have one interactive point. It would be better if there were more feedback in this regard, because clicking the background with the cursor never registers, even when finding that one correct hotspot.

Unless players are interested in replaying any of Looped 's minigames, there's no reason to track down all the hidden clicks, and the game features no Steam achievements to collect.

Beyond that, there’s another hidden object game within the game, where finding a random click location adds a collectible arrow to the planetary game map. Tracking them all down ultimately reveals a trivial bonus, but there are only eight scenes in the entire game, so this adds only the smallest amount of padding, and doesn’t actually factor into the “true” ending.

Some scenes feature an equally trivial minigame, but it can quickly grow annoying to have to play through an entire scene to find that hidden click. The last scene in particular involves the game’s most intricate puzzle, and players should note that there’s no way to skip through its preamble to try it again.

Final Thoughts & Review Score

1.5/5 - "Poor" by Screen Rant's Review Metric

If Looped was longer, it could be accused of padding to prevent easy manipulation of Steam’s return policy. However, it will still only take about 30 or 45 minutes to run from intro to credits, so that’s certainly not the case, and the game’s brevity keeps everything low on stress and stakes. It’s also a fairly unsophisticated game and narrative, so it’s hard to attach too much to the characters, and when a traditional “train sex” visual gag crept up, it elicited a long groan.

These snags make it hard to understand why Looped was ever made into a game in the first place. It’s really just a very short film parceled out into a lightly interactive adventure, and the story never benefits from being interactive or offers enough content to prompt a return to it after solving its few scenarios.

Luckily, it’s also given a price to compare, which makes Looped adequately suited as a five-dollar distraction at its current discount sale. Past that, it’s hard to match it against the many more involved adventure games that would compare in the same bracket. In other words: dragging hearts onto a cartoon dog’s eyes just doesn’t make their elementary love story any more engaging.

Screen Rant received a digital PC code for the purpose of this review.