Dog Days Dog Daze is about the sweet taste of neethood where the days collapse into an impenetrable haze and every “meaningful” thing you do is quickly subsumed into it. Some girls are fated to die, others to relapse, to just kind of be there, to be really annoying or even to do as the tags indicate and daydrink; Dog Days says none of these things are really worse or better or even distinct from one another.
What makes Dog Days compelling as a story despite this nihilistic attitude is that it's aware that all these struggles still feel real and painful and world shattering in the moment. The actual events of the plot are less dramatic than the apocalyptic scale of She Was Swallowed By The Sun or the cascading shitshow of Loner Dog but do any of the girls involved know that? And because of that even if nothing is really learned and no one really changes much the plot remains compelling (with one unlucky exception but who cares about her).
Dog Days is also very compelling as a companion piece to Loner Dog because of how many synchronicities between the two works there are. Girl colours seemingly act as archetypes in this twisted snuppy world. Is this eternal return? Does it mean anything? Do material conditions determine history? You aren't going to learn the answer to any of these but the whole experience adds an interesting texture to the work.
Visually everything is spectacular. Portraits burst out of their square layers and hang a layer over the dialogue, full character art cards are equally compelling little portraits of the girls, and the city background we repeatedly return to has sinkdog. Like any true visual novel the backgrounds are blurry photos. The soundtrack is a similar star.
One area where the game has unfortunately regressed compared to its predecessor is how it uses the visual novel format. Loner Dog was full of fun uses of the text box, popups of images and more. Noni bashing her head into the concrete and the text box shaking and being left off balance was amazing. Dog Days by comparison is far less experimental - about on the level of She Was Swallowed By The Sun with how it plays with the format. Unfortunate but as far as I can tell a consequence of the smaller scope.
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