What you can hear right now is a thousand eyeballs rolling into the back of their heads. Even before I write the big sentence explaining what kind of game “Dogpile” is, I can already see into the future and sense my editor immediately checking out mentally at the prospect of this game. But I have to do it anyways so you understand how “Dogpile” got its hooks into me and my fiancée so deeply.

Straight from their website: “‘Dogpile’ is a roguelike deck builder about merging cute dogs into bigger dogs.”

Wait, wait! Don’t go! This game has way more to do with the core conceit of “Suika Game” than it does with its other inspiration. If you’re unfamiliar, “Suika Game,” and the recently released “Suika Game Planet,” are about dropping tiny fruits shaped as balls into a big bucket, and if two of the same types touch, they merge into bigger, different fruits.

You keep going until you hit the biggest one — in this case, a watermelon. It’s highly addictive, super simple to pick up and understand, and the physics of the fruits bouncing around can create some devious situations.

So take that gameplay, which is brilliant, and add to it. Like, a lot of stuff to it. The “Suika” games are very plain and barebones, by design, but once you start to glob on elements from “Balatro” then you get a real stew cooking. And if you replace the fruits with dogs then you get the wonderfully splendid and sublime “Dogpile.”

The dogs are tagged as cards, that go from ace (smallest) to king (biggest). You start with a deck of different colors and perks (like “Balatro”) and every so often you visit a store to purchase new cards or boosts. In this case, it’s dog tags, which drastically change the way you play. There are also other fun wrinkles, like being rewarded with dog washes that upgrade your dogs/cards, and bone goals you have to clear or else you get bad traits (fleas, cages, etc.).

There is a beautiful elegance to “Dogpile” that I find very refreshing. You could, if you so choose, pick a deck and just drop dogs until the cows come home — blissfully unaware of anything else this game offers. Or, you can really go ham and beat every deck, on every difficulty, and dive into the different strategies. Will this run be one based around the friendly ability, which makes the dogs magnetic? Or around pack dogs, which automatically play a card from your deck onto the field?

It takes a minute to get adjusted to the terminology and the flow of what’s going on. But once it clicks, this game becomes a favorite of mine in the strange niche subgenre of roguelike deck builders, even though it strays away from those terms as far as it possibly can. You don’t even have to notice there’s a deck or cards at all to enjoy this.

As long as you like dogs, dropping puzzle pieces, and seeing a chain reaction combo, then you will love this game. I guarantee it.

“Dogpile” is available on PC through Steam, and I PRAY it comes to every other console. And my iPad. And my iPhone.

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Image Credit: “Dogpile,” Studio Folly and Toot Games (Foot)