The developer provided Play Critically with a review code for this videogame.

Ollie-Oop combines elements of arcade skateboarding videogames, adventure videogames, and 3D platformers into an eclectic and carefree package. I play as a dog named Ollie. While he slumbers on a couch in front of a television set, I use a remote control to flip through the television’s channels. The sounds that come from each channel influence Ollie’s dreams, becoming the levels where he is a skateboarding master who rolls, grinds, jumps, and barks his way across seven unique environments. These can be as ordinary as a suburban neighborhood where other dogs play, as bizarre as a neon landscape of untextured polygons and Greek ruins, and as unexpected as a medieval kingdom filled with magic and mystery. There’s no overarching plot or goal to drive Ollie from level to level. There isn’t even a proper endstate. Ollie-Oop reaches for a purer form of fun than can be found from checking off lists and saving the world.

The main draw of Ollie-Oop is its absurd premise. Ollie isn’t just a skateboarding dog. Ollie is a master of the sport. Usually when I see a player character riding a skateboard, I anticipate the immense agility and athleticism required to handle their vehicle translated into a skill-based videogame demanding precise technical inputs and careful control of the player character’s balance. 

Ollie-Oop subverts my anticipations with streamlined skateboarding design. One button increases Ollie’s speed on his skateboard. Another makes him jump and perform tricks. A third makes him grind any nearby rails or edges. A fourth prompts his bark, which has many effects on the environment. Ollie cannot crash his board, no matter how hard he impacts an obstacle or crookedly he lands a jump. His balance is flawless; he can grind the longest rails and edges effortlessly and indefinitely, jumping down when he chooses to and not when his equilibrium becomes too precarious to manage. This invulnerability is part of Ollie-Oop’s charm. The simple, three-button control scheme and crash-free riding illustrates how Ollie has transcended the pro skater trappings of other skateboarding videogames, at least in his dreams.

At times Ollie’s skill combines with the dreamscape settings to become pure surrealism. Many levels in Ollie-Oop contain bodies of water. They have no corresponding physics to affect the player character’s movement. When Ollie touches a liquid surface, he does not float. He does not sink. He does not reset to dry land while a witty one-liner taunts me in red text. He speeds down to the body’s bed and rolls along its surface as though water were no more an obstacle than air. Ollie’s skateboarding skill is so tremendous that obstacles which hinder other videogame skateboarding protagonists seemingly have no effect on him at all.

While the player character projects feelings of freedom and skill, the videogame itself often fails to let Ollie’s prowess glow. The physics of a quarterpipe are a particular recurring problem. A skateboarder should leap from the edge of a quarterpipe into the air and fall back into that same pipe, landing back on their board’s wheels and rolling out of the quarterpipe with a boost of speed.

Ollie struggles with these skilled landings. Often he lands on his back, but because he cannot actually crash, he continues to flail as though still airborne while his torso clips through the ground. Only when I press the jump button again does Ollie right his board and zoom off to another obstacle. Even something as simple and essential as getting Ollie to leap out from pools and bowls can be a problem. On a few occasions, no matter how hard I thrash the joystick, he becomes trapped in a quarterpipe like a satellite caught in a planet’s gravity.

Ollie-Oop does have an “Unstick Ollie” button placed in its pause menu. Its prominence is ominous, as though it’s not only possible Ollie will become stuck on an object, it is expected. Rather than bumping Ollie a short distance away from where he has become trapped, the button inelegantly resets him back to the level’s spawning position. On the largest levels, this can be a long distance to retrace.

Levels grow in scale and ambition as Ollie progresses through them. The earliest levels are ordinary. They might even be mundane if they were not set up as a playground for a dog who can humble any pro on his skateboard. The public park of the New Dog, New Tricks tutorial and the quaint cul de sac of The Dog Next Door level abruptly give way to the Mythic West pastiche of The Good, The Bad, and the Pugly. In this massive space, Ollie is transported to a desert complete with a saloon, a railroad—upon which Ollie can grind fully from one end of the level to the other—and an oasis that vanishes into the desert heat as he draws near. Later levels enter even more unexpected settings. Paws Attacks! transports Ollie to a moon filled with advanced drilling equipment. The Kingdom of the Muddy Paws is by far Ollie-Oop’s most gigantic and it uses that scale to cram as many affectionate high fantasy cliches into its space as possible.

Ollie progresses through levels by completing individual missions in each. Missions reward him with a handful of Pupcakes, a wonderfully named pastry which is sadly represented by an ordinary cupcake topped with pink icing. Pupcakes can be spent to open new levels on the level select screen. The number Ollie receives for completing objectives and the total available in a level is seemingly arbitrary. Some missions give Ollie a single Pupcake. Others give him three or more at once. Some levels have as few as four Pupcakes total to earn. Others have several dozen. The amount of Pupcakes Ollie earns from level to level are pure chaos, seemingly decided on whims and not on balancing my progression through Ollie-Oop’s seven levels.

Missions are as varied as the level settings themselves. In The Dog Next Door’s unremarkable neighborhood, Ollie gathers fallen sticks to repair a bridge across a river, dislodges birds from a neighbor’s satellite dish, and searches for a Corgi’s scattered bone collection. The growing outlandishness of the later levels make their objectives more unusual. In The Good, The Bad, and the Pugly, Ollie must smelt gold from raw ore prized from veins in a mine using sticks of dynamite. Paws Attacks! finds Ollie using meteorite fragments to power up dormant machinery. In the Kingdom of the Muddy Paws, Ollie helps a witch dispel a magical barrier by brewing a potion in her cauldron, carefully searching the nearby swamp to find the exact ingredients she needs.

Some of Ollie’s missions are specialized, briefly transforming Ollie-Oop into a completely different kind of videogame. Playing soccer with another dog converts the free-roaming camera into a first person perspective where I use a targeting reticle to fire soccer balls into a net past a small dog acting as goalie; this is less a round of soccer than an inverted shooting gallery. Another minigame high on a hilltop sets Ollie on a linear, winding track. To win, he uses a long stick to knock pumpkins off of platforms as he passes by them. Ollie-Oop tries to justify this as training for a jousting tournament. It feels more like one dog’s excuse to build a rollercoaster in a fantasy kingdom.

Completing missions is where I experience most of my troubles playing Ollie-Oop. The Good, The Bad, and the Pugly is a particular nexus of problems. One mission tasks Ollie with freeing miners who have become trapped by cave-ins. Each miner is supposed to speak with Ollie before running to safety. During my first time through the level, one of the miners never speaks with Ollie. I have to quit the level to reset the mission and try again. I am able to complete the mission on the second attempt, but I am not correctly awarded new Pupcakes, depriving me of the achievement for gathering all of them in the level. This is not a unique issue; despite finding all of the Pupcakes in every other level, none of those achievements are awarded to me either.

Other technical problems are more general. A collectable in the Kingdom of the Muddy Paws are star fragments. I can trade twenty of these colorful shards in the village for a Pupcake and it’s possible to stockpile quite a number if I’m diligent about guiding Ollie to them. The problem arises when gathering too many. Ollie-Oop interprets any number higher than 100 as resetting back to zero, so if Ollie speaks to a merchant with 115 star fragments in his pockets, they think he has only 15. I must help him find five more fragments to buy a single Pupcake when he should be able to purchase many more.

Even Ollie-Oop’s graphics give me some difficulty. Especially in the early levels, most surfaces are decorated with flat, plain textures and few polygons cast shadows. This can make it surprisingly difficult to interpret what lies in front of Ollie. What appears to be a slope is often a quarterpipe, resulting in an unexpected leap into the sky. This noticeably becomes less of a problem in later levels which use more detailed textures whose curves and slopes are easier to read.

As I play Ollie-Oop, it becomes difficult to overlook a fundamental fact: Few of its activities have anything to do with skateboarding. Smashing pumpkins does not require a skateboard. Searching for buried treasure does not require a skateboard. Restoring power to a moon dog’s television set does not require a skateboard. Some of these activities are made more interesting through the use of a skateboard. Many of them make me grumble, “this would be a whole lot easier if Ollie could walk and jump normally.” While Ollie-Oop is designed around the fanciful idea of a skateboarding dog, few of its objectives feel like they were made with this theme in mind. Skateboarding feels more like a gimmick than a complete idea.

The exception is a level called Pupperwave. It is seemingly set inside an early 3D graphics engine, complete with checkerboard textures, wireframe polygons, colossal rails that spiral into an empty, maroon sky, and Ancient Greek ruin “clip art” decorations, which were common demo objects in early 3D engines for some reason. Goals in this level feel familiar. Score an arbitrary number of points—the only level in Ollie-Oop to award and track points for landing tricks. Destroy an arbitrary number of statues. Find the letters spelling T-R-E-A-T. Find a hidden cassette tape. For one glorious, neon-soaked level, Ollie-Oop embraces the presumption that a videogame about a skateboarding dog must imitate Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The next level returns to the structure of Ollie-Oop’s previous levels. 

While I appreciate the attempt to have some variety between levels, I find myself missing the Pro Skater homage as soon as Ollie leaves Pupperwave. It gives the skateboarding a real purpose. Maybe I’m just too stuck on the idea of what a skateboarding videogame “should” be. If Ollie-Oop is creating an alternative, its new ideas of what digital skateboarding could be do not win me over.

Ollie-Oop is a fun idea for a videogame. A dog who becomes an unstoppable skateboarding prodigy in his dreams sounds like an incredible player character, able to perform any trick flawlessly, ride any rail endlessly, and charge through any obstacle like a cannonball. It’s let down by its own engine and the design of its activities. Ollie is a master skateboarder let loose in a dream world where a skateboard is more often a hindrance than a help. He cannot crash or fall, leaving him spinning like a top when he bails. There’s some enjoyment to be found in Ollie-Oop’s absurd premise, the sometimes surreal physics, and an occasional inspired mission. Most of my time playing is spent in frustration, struggling against its bugs and quirks. This dog shoots for the moon and gets lost along his way.