Planet Zoo is a promising zoo game and an exhilarating philosophical nightmare

They say you should never ask how the sausage is made, but in the case of Frontier’s Planet Zoo, knowing how the game’s creatures were created makes all the difference. Specifically, it’s the difference between two kinds of game. On the one hand, a handsome, top-down management sim in which players breed and nurture pleasingly unruly animals for the delight and education of a rosy-cheeked NPC horde. And on the other, a wrenching Lynchian allegory for the ways in which animals are warped, faked, duplicated and optimised within systems of capital. All of which is quite a lot to swallow just before dinner time, I know. So let’s start with something relatively easygoing: the humble hippo.

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