[3] Howling Dogs opens with a quote from The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away by Kenzaburo Oe[4] and starts off in a metal room.

[1] The game makes the user repeat basic actions, such as eating, drinking, sleeping and bathing, in a repetitive cycle.

The game's visuals consist of a black background with white text and blue hyperlinks, with occasional pixelated images shown[4] when accessing the virtual reality visor.

[1] Writing for Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander called the game an "abstract, often surreal experience centralized on the concept of confinement".

[2] According to Mallika Rao of The Village Voice, Howling Dogs "is a commentary on trauma" and "isn’t so much a video game as a genre-mash, redolent of choose-your-own-adventure books, an unwritten Black Mirror plot, a poem, a depressive spiral, a manic flight.