Who isn’t a sucker for a dog game? Walking the show floor at the Games Industry Conference in Poznań, Wielkopolska, I immediately did a double take when I saw Barkour, a game about a dog secret agent. He’s not just cute and cuddling, he also has a gun and a grappling hook: I had to take this dog for a walk.

You, of course, play as a dog in Barkour. You’re Agent T.H.U.N.D.E.R. (don’t ask me what it stands for, dogs can’t spell anyway), an all-around Good Boy who’s recruited off the streets into a secret dog spy organization, and trained to help them take down nefarious, cat-themed villains. He’s got a pretty robust kit to help him out: his nose can sense enemy locations and interactable items, he can overhear enemy conversations to get important intel, he can bark to lure enemies, pounce on them to knock them out, and drag their bodies into hiding with his teeth. He also has gadgets, including a back-mounted gun that can either use sleep darts to incapacitate or actual bullets to kill anyone who tries to fight him. The gadget wheel had loads of room for other tools, too, so I’m sure there’s more to come to turn Agent THUNDER into a full-blown spydog.

After a lengthy tutorial that introduces the new Agent (and the player) to his gadgets and spy abilities, the demo threw me into an early game mission, which sees our dog hero infiltrate a massive, overgrown, abandoned maze of a medieval castle to take down someone named “Van der Meow” who, with a name like that, clearly must be stopped. Van der Meow is located in the deepest inner sanctum of the castle, and is guarded by various locked doors, security cameras, and scary men with guns. I could sneak my way through, using my sniffer to track enemy locations, seeking cover in bushes, and quietly incapacitating guards with sleep darts before dragging their bodies into alcoves. Or, I could go in guns blazing, alerting the whole room to my presence and starting a proper firefight.

Mostly, I chose stealth, and I was quickly impressed with how much license Barkour gave me to find my own way and mess around within the world, to an almost sandboxy degree. The castle started out fairly linear, but quickly opened up into a winding maze of a place with multiple rooms and floors and a number of hidden pathways outside the castle walls, underground, up towers, in ceiling rafters above the dining hall, and behind locked doors. Barkour’s demo offered a surprising amount of freedom to simply figure things out, experiment, and seek out secrets. Instead of beelining it to my objective, I felt encouraged to puzzle out stealth pathways through multiple unnecessary rooms that were hiding secrets, like new treats or gadgets, on the other side. Diving down wells, digging holes, or trying out tricky little platforming sections that took me on narrow pathways up high towers generally rewarded me with with either a shortcut to somewhere I wanted to go or a prize of some kind.

Of course, I can smell a lot of heavily-armed guards standing between me and that exploration, so I make an effort to take them out one by one to afford myself safe passage. It would be trivial enough to just fire off sleep darts at every single guard and call it a day, but those are a limited resource that I can only recharge by physically tackling guards – a move that’s far more likely to set off alarms. So I spend a lot of the beginning of the demo skulking in shrubbery, waiting for a guard to wander by, barking to lure him close to me, sneak attacking to knock him out cold, and then dragging his body into the bushes before anyone can notice. That gives me a charge of the sleep dart, which I can then use to knock out the next guy, and so on.

It also seems like puzzles will play a part in Barkour, too, though most of what I ran into in the opening level was pretty simple. A lot of the puzzles involved listening in on guard conversations or exploring an area to get a code to unlock a door, or using my sniffer to find hidden buttons I needed to press. Several locations seemed to want me to bring specific items to them to activate something, like a fireplace wanting some logs that I never managed to track down. There was one puzzle later in the demo that involved identifying and tracking down several pieces of medieval weaponry all around the castle, but I struggled with this one a bit: it wanted a sword, and even though I could see swords all over the place, none of them were the exact interactable sword the puzzle wanted me to bring.

I wasn’t quite as impressed with the combat, which still needs some fine tuning. I prefer playing games like this in full stealth-mode, but a few times I did slip up and alert guards to my presence. What followed was what feels like it should have been a challenging combat situation as guards surrounded me from all sides, alarms blared, and shots rang out. What actually happened is I ran literal circles around the guards, pouncing on top of them one after another to stun them and keep them from shooting me, all while infinitely firing my own back-mounted gun to whittle down their health. Rinse and repeat until they’re all dead. I can definitely see what Barkour is going for: the equal emphasis placed on both combat and stealth in the tutorial and gadgets you’re given suggests it wants either method to feel like a viable option. But just in the level I played, the combat was missing something, and I had far more fun with both the challenge and mechanics of stealth.

One note, just to preempt some concerns: Barkour’s free demo on Steam, which is the same one I played, was criticized when it first dropped due to the inclusion of AI voice acting. Following the criticisms, the developers announced that they had removed the AI voices, which they said were only temporary, with plans to hire professionals for the full release. I mention this just because the version I played was the one with the AI voices removed, and thus it didn’t detract from my experience at all.

Overall, Barkour seems extremely promising, it just needs polish – especially the combat. I really enjoyed the openness of the level I played, with all the hidden puzzles and collectibles, and the wide variety of potential strategies to reach my objectives. A stealth game that also functions as a sandbox is a really neat idea, especially paired with such a silly, pup-based premise, and Barkour’s bones are looking real good. With a bit more time and testing, I’m feeling optimistic that the final release will be a doggone treat.