Developed by Indiana-Jonas for Playdate’s Season 2.

Long Puppy is rendered in simple shapes. He’s a dachshund, depicted almost entirely as a string of black circles, with little curves for the ears, tongue, and tail, and short lines of the legs. On the game’s opening screen, his tail wags and the whole body wags with it. It’s cute, in the way that clean, simple drawings often are. And then I heard his panting: animalistic. Rapid and shallow. Someone’s been putting him through his paces.

On the surface, Long Puppy is a game of fetch. You play as the titular Puppy, and in each level your owner, a young boy, throws a ball for you to retrieve. But what starts simple doesn’t remain so, and Long Puppy is at its strongest when it peels back its layer of cuteness to reveal something stranger.

Long Puppy doesn’t walk; instead, he stretches. His head moves forward in a direction determined by the Playdate’s crank, and his body extends to follow. He inchworms across the level, head moving forward, body extending, and then rear retracting to restart the process. But this extension alone isn’t enough to reach the ball, which is always across a chasm, or in a tree, or otherwise placed outside of reach. You’re long, but not long enough. So you eat.

Food coats these levels. There are apples in trees, lollipops in cabinets, and scraps everywhere on the ground. Long Puppy eats them with audible slurps and chomps, and then Long Puppy grows longer. What was once weird and cute is now off-putting, as Long Puppy contorts up tree trunks, twists through ventilation systems, and circles whole buildings in the search for food. There’s a ratcheting, click-click-click sound you hear whenever the Puppy stretches. It’s kind of endearing when Long Puppy is small, like a segmented toy unfolding, but when played out over a twenty-foot stretch the sound is increasingly uncomfortable as it goes from clicking to more of a prolonged squelch, as rib cage and organs and tissue elongate across a yard and over a fence. Long Puppy is endearing as four or five circles. At full extension, he’s a fleshy pearl necklace straight out of hell.

The gameplay is fun, by the way. It’s worth saying that I really enjoyed sniffing and scrounging around these levels, eating and stretching. But what I most appreciate about Long Puppy is its layers, its evocative abstractions that leave the game’s events open to interpretation. The Puppy is only ever simple, playful shapes, but the realistic sounds ground the experience in something basely biological, in eating and contorting. Your owner, a young boy who’s just a circle on top of a triangle, has shades of malice in his words and actions. Is it a coincidence that his ball lands in an abandoned factory, and then down in a grave? Do his demands stem from ill will, or youthful insensitivity? The shapes may be simple, but that doesn’t make meaning inherently straightforward.

This contradiction is best embodied in the game’s other dog, which materializes whenever the Puppy grabs the ball. This dog is a large square with empty eyes and a mouth full of long teeth. The boy identifies this as the ghost of his old dog, who’s “jealous” of you: bring the ball back quick, don’t let him have it!

The old dog is relentless. It floats after you, passing through the walls and obstacles that you have to circumnavigate on the way back to your owner. If he catches you, he takes the ball back in a large gnashing of teeth that leaves you stunned as he floats away. It was during these encounters that the game felt like it had peeled off its last layer, that underneath all of the cute shapes and real sounds was a plain expression of surreal horror.

But for all of the obvious signs, I don’t think that it is that straightforward. Like I said, the ghost dog leaves you stunned, but you’re not actually harmed; you can chase after it to steal the ball back. As the ball passed back and forth between the two dogs, one with a mutant body and the other with no body at all, I saw something besides horror. Yes, this could be a fight, or even a haunting. But it could also be what any two dogs do when they chase after the same ball. It could be play.