Visual Novel / Purrfect Apawcalypse

Purrfect Apawcalypse is a freeware Visual Novel trilogy made by 90% Studios about cute dogs and cats befriending each other, having lots of pawsome adventures, and trying to avoid getting mass-murdered by other dogs and cats out for revenge.

The first game centers on Olive, a perpetually optimistic and cheerful dog who responds to the horror of having almost every other dog at their school slaughtered by an unknown enemy by trying to find someone nice to spend what could possibly be their last hours of life with. They can choose the company of a book-loving Dalmatian named Patches, an athletic huskie named Sparky, and/or a brash and energetic corgi named Brownie — but not all of these dogs may be as trustworthy as they appear. An Updated Re-release, titled Love At Furst Bite was released on Steam on February 16, 2021. It features graphics more in line with the second and third installments, more choices, scenarios, and deaths, an additional Relationship Values with a character who'd previously been excluded, and some other miscellaneous features.

The second game, Purrgatory Furever, has an army of zombie dogs threaten Olive and their friends' lives after the events of the first game and they must work together to find a way to placate them. To make matters worse, a very familiar enemy from the first game comes back to haunt them all with a new ally in tow.

The third game takes place from a different character's perspective — to type their name here would be a major spoiler for people who haven't played the previous games — during a day where dogs and cats are allowed to mingle with each other at the same school. Olive and their friends see this as a great opportunity to prove that dogs and cats really can get along. However, this game's point-of-view character may have other ideas. World-ending ideas.

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Tropes in the game series:

• All-Loving Hero: Olive is an indefatigably upbeat and idealistic individual who's always ready to give others a second chance even if they have a long history of trying to kill them.
• Ambidextrous Sprite: From the second game on, characters face the center of the screen, with those on the right having their sprites flipped. Among other oddities, this results in Sparky and Felix's differently colored eyes being in the wrong position and Patches' eyepatch being on his left eye.
• Art-Style Dissonance: The games' cutesy art style sharply contrasts with their murder-filled plots and huge number of gore-filled bad endings.
• Bandaged Face: Patches has this in the third game, due to him possessing Angel's mutilated corpse that's being kept from falling apart only by Ginger's magic.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Many of the third game's Non-Standard Game Overs have the protagonist learn the hard way that as friendly and forgiving as Olive and their friends are, they will not hesitate to kill him if he goes too far in harming or threatening them.
  • Angel is normally as sweet as his name implies, but he has a huge (and extremely understandable) grudge against Patches. The third game has a possible scene where he gives this character a "The Reason You Suck" Speech and an ending where he attempts to strangle this character when he believes that they've stolen his body again.
• Cast Full of Gay: Olive is non-binary, Brownie and Coco both have clear crushes on each other in the second and third games, and Angel and Patches used to be boyfriends. The third game also has Mittens who's non-binary and their brother Whiskers who has an obvious crush on the male protagonist.
• Cats Are Magic: Coco is a skilled witch and cats in general are depicted as being much more likely and/or expected than dogs to be gifted in magic.
• Cutting Off the Branches: The first game's Golden Ending where Everyone Lives was made canon by the second game, which in turn had its own Golden Ending where Everyone Lives and Patches is saved by Olive made canon by the third game.
• Demonic Possession:
  • In the first game's canon ending, a heroic example occurs when Angel possesses Patches' body to prevent him from killing Olive and lives as him from then on.
  • In the second game, Sparky is possessed by Ginger as part of Patches' plan to kill Olive and their friends.
• The Dog Bites Back: Many of the third game's bad endings have this occur as Patches, despite Olive convincing the other characters to give him a second chance, is still on very thin ice with them due to his long history of murder and sociopathy and they're ready and willing to end his life for good if he proves that he has no intention of ever reforming. The biggest example of this is the ending where Angel, after being taunted and threatened by Patches one too many times, foils Patches' attempt to murder him again by killing him first and expressing relief that he's finally free of him.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: In the third game, you get a special epilogue where Patches is trapped in Inferno for eternity if you get the Downer Ending with rock-bottom affection for all characters. Doing this requires you to make specific choices at every junction so that you act like a huge Jerkass to everyone but don't piss them off so much that they decide to kill you before you get to the end of the day.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • In the first game, Coco suffers zero consequences for having killed almost everyone in Olive's school, none of whom was her brother's killer who she specifically wanted revenge on, and Olive, Brownie, and Sparky are all shown to have happily befriended her in the canon ending's closing image. However, the second and third games subvert this when all the dogs killed in the first game come back as vengeful zombies that swarm Coco's house and Coco has to find a way to appease them and she readily admits that it's her entire fault that she and her friends are in this situation.
  • In the second game, Olive can choose to forgive Patches and convince his friends to give him a second chance in spite of said character having repeatedly tried to murder them. Zigzagged, though, in that Olive's friends are not willing to forgive said character so easily and insist on keeping him in check with a leash and a magical collar that prevents him from hurting others until he demonstrates a sincere willingness to change his ways.
  • Subverted in the third game if you have Patches choose to bring everyone back to life after having killed at least one other character. The killed-off character(s) will show up and tell everyone what Patches did to them, whereupon even Olive will agree that Patches resurrecting them does not make up for him having killed someone who did him no harm yet again even after being given a second chance by them, and lets Coco kill Patches.
    • Though played straight with Coco in the same game. in the Golden Ending, the dogs' reaction to her long story of her being responsible for most of their deaths and how Patches and Angel ended-up body-swapped is just to get bored before the end and start talking with each other, and there's no signs of them holding a grudge in the brief Playable Epilogue.
• Everybody Lives: The canon Golden Endings ultimately end up with this by the end of the third game. Yes, even the one thousand dogs killed in the first game and again in the second. Yes, even Ginger and Angel, who died before the first game even started. Yes, even Patches, who spent almost the entire second and third games in Angel's reanimated corpse after experiencing death-by-possession in the good ending of the first game.
• Eyes Are Mental: After Angel possesses Patches, the body's eyes change color to show that Angel is now the one in charge of Patches' body. The same thing happens with Angel's body when Patches is in possession of it.
• Fantastic Racism: Cats and dogs are shown to be prejudiced toward each other and attend separate schools.
• Fire Alarm Distraction: Patches can attempt this while at school after convincing his "friends" to give him a second chance. Fortunately, pulling it does nothing except reveal a note saying "Nice try. -Coco".
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: Happens with Angel and Patches when they end up possessing each other's bodies, although each possession occurred in separate games as Patches wasn't able to possess Angel's body until he had Ginger dig up Angel's grave for him. The third game focuses the most heavily on this, with Angel and Patches having to pretend to be each other at school as explaining to others about how they ended up in each other's bodies would not end well.
• Godiva Hair: Holly from the third game has a weird hybrid of this and non-Gory Discretion Shot going on. She has expansive white hair that surrounds her like a cloak, serving not to cover nudity but the fact that she has bloody stumps instead of arms, except for a few times her portrait reveals them, usually to underscore a statement.
• Girls Love Chocolate: Brownie absolutely loves chocolate, which is not an ideal trait for her to have since she's a dog who'll die if she eats too much chocolate.
• Guide Dang It!: Getting maximum affection for everyone in the second game can take a lot of trial and error as many seemingly innocuous actions like talking to a character at the wrong time, examining an object with a specific character around, or even merely walking into a room with a specific character in your party, can all cause you to lose affection with a character without warning. Most characters do give you a fair amount of leeway to gain back affection points you lost with them in multiple scenes, but Coco and Patches both interact with you for only one scene each and messing up more than once with them pretty much makes it impossible for you to get full affection with them.
• Hurricane of Puns:
  • Olive's dialogue is littered with cat and dog-related puns, the most common ones being "furiends" and "infurno".
  • In the third game, every single one of the posters and books you can examine has a cat/dog pun. Your character even lampshades it, commenting "Who names these?" when you examine a book cart with titles like Furry Pawter and the Deathly Howls, Lord of the Butterflies, and Shi-Tzu's Art of War.
• If I Can't Have You…: When Angel broke up with Patches after being increasingly creeped out by Patches' clinginess and claims that he would kill Angel if he ever left him, Patches decided to make good on these aforementioned claims.
• Ignored Epiphany: Depending on your choices in the third game, you can have Patches bond with the other characters, have a Heel Realization about his past misdeeds, and admit to Ginger that he wants to change for the better like she did... and then have him choose to order Bapawmet to kill everyone anyway.
• Interspecies Romance: In the second and third games, the dog Brownie has a clear crush on the witch cat Coco but Cannot Spit It Out. Additionally, the third game reveals that the dog Patches and the cat Angel used to date until Patches' increasingly possessive behavior brought about a bloody end to their relationship and also that Ginger and Mittens' dog and cat families interbred with each other in the distant past.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Just seeing the full title for the third game spoils the identity of the series' main villain in the previous two games. Seeing its title image and/or reading its summary also spoils the events that occur in the second game's canon ending.
• Lovable Jock: Sparky, a huskie who loves sports, is a very friendly and laidback dog. The third game also has Rover and Tigger who aren't too bright but are just as nice to you as Sparky.
• Love Makes You Evil:
  • Patches was already pretty unstable even before he fell in love with Angel, but the latter breaking up with him was what caused him to snap and turn to murder as retailation.
  • Ginger willingly aids Patches in attempting to murder the entire cast in the second game after falling for him.
• Love Redeems: A platonic case can occur with Patches in the third game if you make the right choices.
• Mood Dissonance: A game series set in a world full of adorable creatures with an All-Loving Hero who regularly converts even the most evil of characters to the side of good with The Power of Friendship... that also regularly shows said adorable creatures being brutally murdered on-screen and has numerous bad endings where The Power of Friendship isn't enough to save the All-Loving Hero from a painful death.
• Morality Chain: Olive is this to Patches in the third game. If you try to leave the school, Patches will remember Olive's earlier request for him to not leave and stay put.
• Multiple Endings: All three games have numerous possible endings. Most of them have your character suffer a bloody demise, but each game has a Golden Ending where Everyone Lives that's considered to be the canon one.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Subverted; murder is never the best solution to the heroes' problems and inevitably leads to a bad ending. For example, suggesting to Coco that she use the toilet lid or pots and pans in the kitchen as an Improvised Weapon against a possessed Sparky or the zombie dogs locks you into a bad ending, whereas insisting that you try to befriend the zombie dogs instead by feeding them meat keeps you on track for a good ending.
• The Noseless: The anthropomorphic dog and cat characters that make up the cast of the series are consistently drawn without noses.
• "Not So Different" Remark: If Olive chooses to Save the Villain at the end of the second game, they convince their friends to help them do this by pointing out that several of them are just as guilty of killing innocents as the villain is and that if they deserved to be given a second chance by Olive in spite of the murders they committed, the villain deserves to be given one too.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In the second game, Sparky's attempt to hunt down Patches and Ginger on his own results in Patches getting a hold of Coco's magic wand, the only thing capable of banishing him, and using it to ensnare Sparky and Olive's friends.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Doug, the seemingly mindless zombie dog in the third game, turns out to be perfectly sound of mind — he just pretends to be braindead to get away with being lazy.
• The Power of Friendship: In each game, you can get the Golden Ending only if you took the time to befriend everyone you could, including even the most seemingly amoral of villains.
• Relationship Values: Each game keeps track of how much affection each character has for the protagonist with heart meters. This doesn't affect gameplay much in the first game, but having a positive relationship with every character is required to get the Golden Ending in the second game and maxing out everyone's heart meters lets you see a bonus drawing of all the characters in both the second and third games.
• Restraining Bolt: After Patches is restored to life in Angel's body, he's forced to wear a magical collar that prevents him from committing any evil deeds until he proves that he's willing to reform.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  • The first game has Coco use magic to murder every student in Olive's school she came across in search of her brother Angel's killer.
  • The second game has Patches's spirit come back to wreak bloody revenge on everyone he perceives as having wronged him, which is basically everyone else in the cast.
• Save the Villain: Olive can choose to do this in the second game, and doing it is a requirement to get that game's Golden Ending.
• Skewed Priorities: The first and second games can give this humorous sort of impression with how they detail your Relationship Values with everyone after you get an ending, even if that ending involved you and everyone else getting stabbed to death. Sure you died but, hey, at least you made this one character really happy before you did!
• Ship Tease:
  • While Olive doesn't get a true love interest in any of the games as they're much more interested in being friends with everyone, they still get shippy moments with pretty much everyone they interact with due to their extremely affectionate nature and tendency to blush whenever complimented. Olive/Sparky in particular gets teased at a lot in the second game with Olive gushing constantly about how handsome and tall Sparky is to the point where Brownie ribs them about it.
  • The third game teases at possible Angel/Luna and Sparky/Ginger pairings, as well as adding more fuel to the fire of the all-but-canon Brownie/Coco pairing.
• Shout-Out:
  • Patches' catchphrase, "Hello puppy", and the in-universe cartoon it was cribbed from, is a pretty clear reference to Hello Kitty.
  • In the second game, one character shouts, "Here's [character name]!" as they're breaking down a door.
  • The library in the third game has a ton of references to other books. Furry Pawter and the Deathly Howls, Lord of the Butterflies, Shi-Tzu's Art of War, The Fetcher in the Rye, The Metamorfursis, The Paw of Cthulhu, Furrenheit 826, Where's Ragdoll, Pugs & Prejudice, and Buddy and the Chocolate Factory.
  • In the third game, clicking on a piece of paper discarded in the field brings up an image of JaidenAnimations.
  • Tigger, a character in the third game, is a clear gender-flipped Expy of the Winnie the Pooh character of the same name.
• Speech Impediment: Olive has a reasonably pronounced stutter. In the first game, it's easy to mistake it as due to fear, but in one possible scene where Brownie lampshades it as such, Olive admits that they've just always stuttered, and the ending of the second game and entirety of the third confirm that it really is just how they talk, even when there's nothing to be afraid of. Felix from the third game has an even more pronounced one than Olive, which sometimes descends into Porky Pig Pronunciation.
• Stalker with a Crush: In the third game, Patches has clearly not fully gotten over Angel and can choose to stare at Angel multiple times in Literature class until Angel gets creeped out enough to leave class to get away from him, whereupon Patches can follow him and attack him... or instead accept that he shouldn't have killed Angel for breaking up with him and that he needs to move on from him.
• Tap on the Head: Subverted. Trying to knock out a possessed Sparky with the toilet lid or pan cracks his skull open, killing him.
• The Stinger: In the second game, achieving the Golden Ending with maxed-out Relationship Values gives you a bonus scene after the ending that shows all the characters hanging out together with hearts floating above their heads and the game tells you, "You made everyone super happy!" Then there's a close-up of Patches' heart turning black and broken and the game adds "Almost", showing that not everything has been fully resolved yet.
• Take Your Time: In the second game, you can continue putzing around the house and examining objects to your heart's content even when urgent events like Coco screaming in her bedroom or her house being invaded by angry zombie dogs have just happened and the other characters are yelling at you to stop wasting time. In fact, you pretty much need to do this to get maximum affection points for everyone.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: In the third game, you can choose to poison Brownie's cake with chocolate. Since Brownie is a dog, eating the cake causes her to become violently ill and run to the bathroom to puke.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The magic book you find hidden away in the school library in the third game. It contains, among many other occult things, instructions on how to start the Apocalypse with a certain set of ingredients.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Depending on your choices in the third game, Patches can respond to being given a new body and a chance at redemption by Olive and their friends by acting like a complete asshole to them and even killing all of them.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: In the third game, since you're playing as someone who has far less moral scruples than Olive, you have plenty of opportunities to insult, harm, or even kill others. Go too far with the cruelty, however, and...
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: ...you'll almost certainly find yourself suffering a brutal death at the hands of the character you tried to torment.
• Villain Protagonist: You play as Patches, the dog who tried to murder Olive and their friends in the previous two games and is scheming to slip free of his Restraining Bolt and bring about the apocalypse in the third game.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The murderous ghosts patrolling the school in the first game turn out to be easily defeated by water, which the characters find out about only if Olive tries throwing a water bottle at one in desperation. Sparky points out that this does make a strange sort of sense as the ghosts looked like those of cats.
• World of Funny Animals: The series world is populated entirely by anthropomorphic dogs and cats.

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