Skip to main content
PC Gamer PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES
Sign in
  • View Profile
  • Sign out
flag of UK
UK
flag of US
US
flag of Canada
Canada
flag of Australia
Australia
  • Games
  • Hardware
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Guides
  • Video
  • Forum
  • More
    • PC Gaming Show
    • Software
    • Movies & TV
    • Coupons
    • Magazine
    • Newsletter
    • Community guidelines
    • Affiliate links
    • Meet the team
    • About PC Gamer
PC Gamer Magazine Subscription
PC Gamer Magazine Subscription
Why subscribe?
  • Subscribe to the world's #1 PC gaming mag
  • Try a single issue or save on a subscription
  • Issues delivered straight to your door or device
From$32.49
View
Popular
  • Amazon Prime Day Deals
  • Essential Hardware
  • Microsoft
  • AI
  • PC Gaming Show
Recommended reading
Two puppies making their way through the darkness with a torch to a haunted house
Horror Haunted Paws lets you and a friend navigate a haunted house as two dogs trying to find their missing human friend
An anthropomorphic dog detective and his two sidekicks surrounded by shadowy figures
Adventure In The Shadow Syndicate you're a dog detective who shoots people in bullet-time and wears a cursed ring
A crystal dangles from the ceiling, seen from the point of view of someone holding a rapier
RPG I defeated a bird by talking to it about the Bible in this lo-fi first-person RPG where you're a 19th century daemon summoner
An armored arbitrator with his cyber-mastiff
FPS Darktide's first DLC class gets a cybernetic dog who is a very good boy, and will arrive alongside a free update that structures missions in a campaign at long last
RuneScape: Dragonwilds screenshot
Survival & Crafting RuneScape: Dragonwilds has finally made me realise that, actually, maybe the skill grind isn't so bad
Nessie talking to the fisherman
Games I've already found the best fishing game in Steam's Fishing Fest, Scale the Depths, which lets you feed fish to Nessie in Loch Ness and hunt for the mythic Beithir
Tales of the Shire
Life Sim Tales of the Shire wants to make sure 'every detail is just right' when starting your hobbit life, but the character creator still looks incredibly disappointing
  1. Games
  2. Adventure

Testing the realism of a dog-walking game by walking my dog

Features
By Christopher Livingston published 2 December 2015

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Dog-walking simulator

Dog-walking simulator

Loot Hound is game about taking your dog to the park and letting him dig up treasures for you. There are RPG elements—treasure gives you points you can use to train your dogs to be more skilled at digging, to have greater concentration, or more stamina. As you play you unlock more parks and different hounds.

Having a dog of my own, a small terrier mix named Hank, I thought I'd take him for walk after playing Loot Hound to see just how realistic this dog-walking simulator was. I rated each activity with an accuracy score, or as I called it—because I'm so clever—a BARK-uracy score.

Page 1 of 12
Page 1 of 12
Loot Hound loves to be walked

Loot Hound loves to be walked

To walk one of your loot hounds, simply approach him while he's lying in his bed. The leash will pop on and the hound will be ready to go. Then just walk to the door and select the park you want to visit. Easy enough! Our dog Hank, on the other hand, gives me more of a challenge.

Page 2 of 12
Page 2 of 12
Hank loves to be walked, sort of

Hank loves to be walked, sort of

While Hank loves walks, he does not love the harness or leash and he runs away when we try to put it on him. Every single time. That's why he's blurry in the picture. Even when he's rung his bell (we have a bell on a ribbon hanging next to the door, and he swats it with his paw to signal that he needs to go out) we have to chase him down to get his leash on. Once the leash is on, though, he's happy to go.

Why can we train our dog to ring a bell when he has to poop, but can't train him to sit still while we put on his leash? I can't answer that. The answer lies only in Hank's tiny brain.

BARK-uracy score: 4

Page 3 of 12
Page 3 of 12
Loot Hound is easily distracted

Loot Hound is easily distracted

Loot Hound's job is to dig up treasures, but there are many distractions in the various parks. Beehives draw your hound's attention in particular, and if you haven't leveled up his concentration skill, he'll stop digging and go stare at bees. Can you blame him? Bees are fascinating.

Page 4 of 12
Page 4 of 12
Hank is easily distracted

Hank is easily distracted

While we didn't encounter any beehives, we still ran into several distractions on our walk. Someone closed a car door half a block away, which was cause for concern. Another person was talking on a phone inside their house, which drew a long stare. A bird in a tree said something, probably "chirp", which was treated with the attention one might give an alien spaceship landing on the White House lawn.

And we ran into Lucky, a neighborhood cat that Hank likes to visit/sniff. This is why our trip to the park, a three minute walk for a human, has thus far taken the better part of a half-hour.

BARK-uracy score: 9

Page 5 of 12
Page 5 of 12
Loot Hound is obsessed with squirrels. So is Hank.

Loot Hound is obsessed with squirrels. So is Hank.

Squirrels provide another distraction in Loot Hound, often leading your dog away from his digging business. Leaving for our walk, Hank spotted a squirrel on our lawn and ran at it so forcefully he yanked my hand into our glass door hard enough to almost break it (both my hand and the door). At the park, he spotted another and pursued it until it cleverly gave him the slip by moving to the other side of a tree. Hank was baffled.

Above, the squirrel looks at me like, "Is this moron with you?" and I'm like "Uhhh nope. Don't know him."

BARK-uracy score: 10

Page 6 of 12
Page 6 of 12
Loot Hound pees on things. Hank pees on ALL of the things

Loot Hound pees on things. Hank pees on ALL of the things

This is a picture of my dog urinating. You're welcome. In the game your dog will occasionally pause to make a big ol' puddle before moving on. Hank doesn't typically let go a big long gusher, preferring instead to ration his wee, distributing dozens of tiny fragrant missives evenly over the neighborhood. This is why our half-mile walk has now entered its third hour.

BARK-uracy score: 7

Page 7 of 12
Page 7 of 12
Chasing and barking at joggers

Chasing and barking at joggers

There was only one jogger in the park this morning, and while Hank didn't bark at or chase them like the dogs of Loot Hound, he was briefly distracted from his fortieth stop to widdle on something. He does sometimes try to chase people, or at least run over to them. Truthfully, most of Hank's barkin' happens at home, where threatening-looking people (anyone) passing close to the house (within a half-mile) get sternly told off.

BARK-uracy Score: 6

Page 8 of 12
Page 8 of 12
Dropping the leash

Dropping the leash

While walking your loot hound, you can let the leash out to give him more freedom, or reel it in to keep him close. However, if you're both pulling at the same time it may be yanked out of your hand, and you'll have to chase him down to retrieve it.

I dropped Hank's leash once. It retracted, which made him think he was being chased by a clonking plastic thing. He ran down the entire block, in the middle of the street, with the leash handle bumping behind him the whole way. Luckily, there were no cars or you'd probably be reading about a different dog. That's why I immediately attached a wrist-band so even if I drop it, it stays with me. One drop was plenty.

BARK-uracy score: 9

Page 9 of 12
Page 9 of 12
Loot Hound digs holes

Loot Hound digs holes

The point of taking your loot hound to the various parks is so they can dig up treasures for you. Each park has a number of buried items for your hounds to sniff out and uncover. Find enough, and you'll gain access to more parks with more items. Some items are in areas only reachable by smaller hounds, some items require strong diggers. There are three dogs in the game, each with different strengths, and they can be improved by training them.

Page 10 of 12
Page 10 of 12
Hank digs holes

Hank digs holes

Hank loves digging too, probably because it's coded into his terrier DNA to root out rodents and pests. I don't usually let him dig in the park because he gets covered with dirt, so most of his digging is confined to our couch, where he's often certain a chew toy is wedged between the cushions. He's almost always right, because that's where he likes to buries his chew toys.

On this walk I let him dig a little in the park. It made him happy and dirty.

BARK-uracy score: 10

Page 11 of 12
Page 11 of 12
Loot Hound finds treasure, like socks

Loot Hound finds treasure, like socks

Hank finds sock treasures, too, but in our own home. He's happy to run around holding a toy in his mouth, but it's different when he's stolen a sock. He doesn't just run, he capers, he cavorts. It's the sort of joyous prancing spurred only by the thrill of snatching a forbidden sock, and perhaps knowing he'll be chased around for a while. I guess that's enough treasure for both of us.

BARK-uracy score: 7

Loot Hound BARK-uracy total: 57/80

Loot Hound is a cute and casual RPG and the most realistic game I've played in 2015. It's available on Steam.

Page 12 of 12
Page 12 of 12
Christopher Livingston
Christopher Livingston
Social Links Navigation
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

Read more
Two puppies making their way through the darkness with a torch to a haunted house
Haunted Paws lets you and a friend navigate a haunted house as two dogs trying to find their missing human friend
An anthropomorphic dog detective and his two sidekicks surrounded by shadowy figures
In The Shadow Syndicate you're a dog detective who shoots people in bullet-time and wears a cursed ring
A crystal dangles from the ceiling, seen from the point of view of someone holding a rapier
I defeated a bird by talking to it about the Bible in this lo-fi first-person RPG where you're a 19th century daemon summoner
An armored arbitrator with his cyber-mastiff
Darktide's first DLC class gets a cybernetic dog who is a very good boy, and will arrive alongside a free update that structures missions in a campaign at long last
RuneScape: Dragonwilds screenshot
RuneScape: Dragonwilds has finally made me realise that, actually, maybe the skill grind isn't so bad
Nessie talking to the fisherman
I've already found the best fishing game in Steam's Fishing Fest, Scale the Depths, which lets you feed fish to Nessie in Loch Ness and hunt for the mythic Beithir
Latest in Adventure
Sad face standing in front of a crashed plane
'Coconuts will now bonk scouts': Peak's latest update makes fruit even deadlier but has spared other items from the same treatment
peak multiplayer mod
'Hi modders <3': Peak devs know we're using mods to break past the 4-player limit, and they're so cool with it they're even fixing mod-specific bugs
A climber skeleton generated by the Everest mod in Peak.
Peak modder celebrates the grim achievement of generating 10,000 skeletons in a single day with a mod that 'creates a shared experience of failure and discovery' by littering the island with the corpses of your fellow scouts
A woman in a floral dress extends her bare foot to a kneeling man, in a screenshot from Chinese FMV game Revenge on Gold Diggers.
Chinese FMV game about getting 'revenge on gold diggers' plunges the country into online gender tumult
Peak scout posing
Peak re-releases its next update aimed at improving stability and reassures players 'we don't have any issue with sharing video content, including modded stuff'
Poisoned and dying
Peak devs accidentally released a patch that 'made a number of players totally unable to play' so now there's a new public beta Steam branch for everyone to mess around in safely
Latest in Features
Fallen London
I've swapped modern live service games for a browser game that's been running since 2009
Four people in armour stand atop a desert landscape. The far left one faces away from camera in black armour, a barbarian with their face covered by a mask stands next to them. A female with medium-length brown hair and white shimmering armour duel wields guns, one held up and one pointing out to her right. Below her outstretched gun an archer crouches, their face obscured by an elaborate headdress.
These 15 PC games died for our sins—can you even remember their names?
Player doing a kickflip in the waterpark map in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 + 4
I would've loved Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 a lot more if it hadn't made the mistake of rolling out time limits for every level
Lea, from Lies of P: Overture, clutches a locket to her chest and tries to maintain her composure.
Lies of P isn't my favourite soulslike, but Overture is one of the best DLCs in the whole genre
Marvel Rivals Season 3 customisation issues: An upper-body shot of Phoenix with her arms out to the side.
If Marvel Rivals doesn't want to reward me with fancy skins for my hard work, then I hope it'll at least give me some of Season 3's new customisation features
Can you guess the PC game based only on the health bar?
  1. Nvidia RTX 5090 and XFX RX 9070 graphics cards
    1
    Best graphics cards in 2025: I've tested pretty much every AMD and Nvidia GPU of the past 20 years and these are today's top cards
  2. 2
    Best gaming laptop in 2025: I've put the best of this new generation head-to-head and we have a winner
  3. 3
    Best gaming chair in 2025: I've tested a ton of gaming chairs and these are the seats I'd suggest for any PC gamer
  4. 4
    Best Steam Deck accessories in Australia for 2025: Our favorite docks, powerbanks and gamepads
  5. 5
    Best graphics card for laptops in 2025: the mobile GPUs I'd want in my next gaming laptop
  1. A Mecha Break pilot in a white and pink suit standing before the head of her mech of the same color
    1
    Mecha Break review
  2. 2
    Mycopunk review
  3. 3
    Persona 5: The Phantom X review
  4. 4
    NZXT N7 Z890 review
  5. 5
    NZXT N9 X870E review

PC Gamer is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.

  • About Us
  • Contact Future's experts
  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Cookies policy
  • Advertise with us
  • Accessibility Statement
  • Careers

© Future US, Inc. Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036.

Please login or signup to comment

Please wait...