The first thing anyone playing Animal Shelter Simulator, produced by Games Incubator, should do is to go to the settings menu and turn up the ‘look sensitivity’ option to the maximum to avoid what for me was a cumbersome default that left my avatar slow to turn in any direction and lumbering around and performing multi-point turns to navigate small spaces from the confines of a first person view. Once done, the game becomes more playable, as you look to manage and grow a small shelter - in my case dubbed ‘Ol’s Rescue Shack’. Gameplay follows an easy loop of picking cats or dogs to bring into the shelter, then working to restore the pet to good health and happiness and prepare them for rehoming; this latter stage achieved by placing a digital advert online, then checking out potential adopters and picking someone suitable to take them in. Players can upgrade their facilities, expand their grounds and buy various accessories you’d expect to find in a shelter, from food and water to toys, pet shampoo, poo bags and brooms and mops. The setting is cosy and scored by a mix of dainty sentimental piano tracks and something more akin to light jazz-inflected daytime TV background filler. While the gameplay does become quite repetitive and some of the controls and interface can take some getting used to, particularly with some of the virtual monitor button-select colour changes that are so subtle they aren’t particularly clear, Animal Shelter Simulator has its merits. The adoptive animals - with their individual personalities, appearances, and backgrounds - are rendered realistically enough to be endearing and it can be rewarding to see how some care and attention can build a nervous dog’s confidence and get its tail wagging again.