In The Doghouse — Play Free Online

In The Doghouse is a puzzle game from Nitrome about rearranging a messy house until a dog can reach its treats. You never steer the dog directly. Instead you slide, rotate and shuffle the rooms of a cutaway house until a route opens up from the front door to the goal, and the pup walks it on its own.

Each level is a single house shown in cross-section, split into a grid of rooms, hallways, stairs and elevators. Only empty rooms can be moved, so furniture and other obstacles have to be worked around rather than shoved aside. It is a slower, more thoughtful kind of puzzle than the arcade games around it, which makes it a pleasant change of pace on a Doodle Jump site.

How to play

In The Doghouse is played entirely with the mouse. Click and drag an empty room into a neighbouring slot to slide it, and use the rotation marker to spin a room around. Doors line up with other doors across the house, and staircases and elevators carry the dog between floors.

When the route looks right, drop the bone somewhere along it. The dog trots to wherever the bone sits, so you place it, move it and place it again to coax the pup forward one hop at a time. There is no timer and no move limit, and a reset button returns the rooms to where they started if you have boxed yourself in.

Tips

• Plan the route before you drag anything. Most levels are small enough to trace in your head first.
• Move the empty rooms first, since they are the only ones that slide, and clear a lane before you worry about the furniture.
• Use the bone as a probe. Drop it ahead of the dog and watch where it walks; if it stalls, you have found the gap.
• Do not be afraid of the reset button. There is no penalty for scrambling the layout, so starting over is often quicker than undoing rooms one at a time.

Similar games on Doodle Jump

If you like the methodical, plan-ahead feel of In The Doghouse, Fireboy and Watergirl has a similar route-building rhythm but adds a second character to juggle. Helix Jump is a lighter single-touch puzzle for the opposite, faster pace, and Doodle Jump itself is the site's namesake for pure reflex jumping.

It is a calm game built for short sessions: levels are single screens, there is no fail state, and a level rarely takes more than a couple of minutes. Play it on a desktop browser with a mouse in hand.