About This Demo

Dog in the Machine is a tactical roguelite where you help an AutoDog escape a dystopian mecha-city and reunite with its exiled humans.
Battle through a series of encounters on compact grids filled with reactive elements, enemy guardians, and environmental hazards. Preview your actions, experiment with different strategies, and trigger the most satisfying chain reactions.
Between fights, meet quirky characters and craft a modular arsenal of attacks built around your favorite synergies.

💥 MASTER THE DOMINO EFFECT

Every battlefield is generated to be a chain-reaction playground. Domino effect collision systems, reactive enemies, conveyor belts, interactive buttons, explosive obstacles...

No boring fights: All these elements give players the opportunity to crack the perfect solution in each battle, destroying waves of enemies in a spectacular way.

🧠 DEEP TACTICS, ZERO FRUSTRATION

Thanks to a real-time preview system, you can see exactly how your instruction sequence will play out before committing. Smoothly try, cancel, retry, and build a solution without cognitive overload, experimenting freely until you find your favorite outcome.

If you lose, it will be due to a flaw in your strategy, not a careless mistake.

🦴 COMBINE YOUR TRICKS

After each battle, your AutoDog learns a new Trick. But more importantly, you will be able to train it to perform more complex Tricks, which you can create freely by combining two others.

You can follow blueprints or invent your own combinations. So by the end of the run, you will have created your own unique playstyle, based on powerful synergies.

👺 EXPAND YOUR ARSENAL

Between fights, meet a cast of quirky characters who reveal the story of the city-machine, each offering their own deck-building choices.
Buy, exchange, loot, upgrade, steal… every encounter is a new opportunity to expand your Trick Library and shape a build that's entirely your own.

DEMO CONTENT

In this demo, you will play as Cookie, the first of the game’s three dogs. Travel through two districts of Automatown, fight your way through hordes of enemies, and face off against two bosses!