At first, Puppet Zoo Pilomy seems like a cute and friendly game. You control an unnamed human as he joins up with an alien named Pilomy to create your own animals, here called puppets. Taking place in a small town, you walk around and talk to the various denizens to get Love Points. Then, you visit a professor and cash in those Love Points to get a random assortment of animal parts from his vending machines. Then, you can mix and match parts to create your own puppets, sending them off to various locales where they appear as polygonal models that walk around.
The mixing and matching aspect is where the game goes wild. All of the animals are based on real creatures, like lions and zebras. along with a few fictional ones like unicorns, but the game is pretty flexible about how you can customize your creatures. You can, for example, swap out a tail and then stick on another head, or take the body of the squirrel and stick on the head of a fox. You can create some truly horrifying abominations if you set your mind to it.
It doesn’t appear that there’s any clear goal, but you’re supposed to generate enough animals to give to a local zoo, at which point you’ll roll credits. But otherwise this is really more of a toy than an actual game. Except even beyond the horrifying animal mutants, this is one strange game. The townspeople are generally cheery to an absurd degree. There’s a building filled with identical looking smiling people that calls themselves the Volunteer Association, but they sure look like a cult. Also, if you pay attention to the save file names on the PlayStation memory card screen, they’ll slowly reveal an unusual story, suggesting that the player character and Pilomy are actually fighting off screen. The whole thing was created as a tie-in with children’s clothing brand Miki House, where contestants could send in their own animal creations. But it seems like the developers got bored of making a standard kids game and decided to make something really weird. According to a personal webpage by an ex-employee at Human, the developer, the staff were at one point considering adding human parts, which would’ve made the whole thing even weirder and more disturbing.
While only released in Japan, Puppet Zoo Pilomy has an option for full English, so even non-Japanese speakers can experience this bizarre and slightly horrifying title.
Links
Personal Website of the Former Human Employee
https://vidyasaur.medium.com/the-disturbing-secret-in-puppet-zoo-pilomy-5d0d077b5300
Lunatic Obscurity – Puppet Zoo Pilomy
The Moo Blog – About a Game – Puppet Zoo Pilomy
