It goes on for a long old time, that path. The only way to discover the truth is to follow the rickety, torchlit path down into the abyss.

As such, at the centre of the zoo, visitors will find a yawning pit surrounded by shattered doric columns, offering no clue as to what lies beneath. What’s it got to do with Southeast Asian wildlife? Nothing. In Greek myth, a Katabasis is a descent into the underworld, which rarely goes well for those who undertake it. ‘Cos the toilet’s been busted since day one, and I can’t be bothered to fix it. An aerial view of Bear Witness, with some inset shots of the ever-present, lolling tongued bears who spectate every poo that takes place there.ĭo you think you could muster the gumption to take a dumption, with a massive crowd of bears running about just a few feet away? Well, it doesn’t matter either way. Beyond the glass, terraces rise up on all sides, and they are absolutely rammo with bears. Upon passing under the rock archway to enter the exhibit, guests find themselves confronted with a single, cramped toilet, pressed in on from all sides by humongously tall glass walls. Because in this zoo, the bears observe the guests. Well, there’s a scintillating twist on the usual bear pit formula, here. “Bear Witness”, the zoo’s star attraction, houses somewhere in the region of thirty Malaysian sun bears (seriously, I lost count, as I just couldn’t stop myself from buying the magnificent little gits), in a gigantic elevated amphitheatre. But at the end of the day they still live in a massive, rectangular concrete pit, which even the most archetypical Victorian bastard would have said looked “a bit bleak”.īuckle up mates, this one’s seriously high-concept. They are fed superb food, I must stress, and have all their needs met to exacting standards. Binturongs are also called bearcats, because they somehow combine the most dismal aspects of bears and cats, and while I quite like them in real life, in my zoo I decided to treat them with utter contempt.

It contains three reeking, racoon-faced beasts called Binturongs. The first thing you see when you enter the zoo, this hulking, windowless concrete silo looks like it might contain some sort of genetically engineered devil. And while it was pleasant enough for the animals which lived in it, I did everything I could to inflict profound psychic damage on the visiting public. This week, I had Planet Zoo’s new Southeast Asia DLC pack to play with, featuring eight new beasts and a huge bundle of new construction assets. And inevitably, when a game gives me that much freedom to do my own thing, it’s only a matter of time before I move things into deeply unsettling territory. Personally, I think that’s a good decision.īut as I already mentioned, it puts a genuinely phenomenal range of construction tools at your disposal: if you can think of a habitat concept, the chances are you can build it. Unlike Frontier’s other animal husbandry game, Jurassic World Evolution, where everyone knows the management layer is just a way of killing time until the inevitable monster deathmatches, Planet Zoo does absolutely nothing to signpost “nightmare animal supermax” as a valid playstyle. While it’s set up to give you as much freedom as possible in every aspect of your zoo’s design, it still steers you firmly towards being good to the animals which live there. Planet Zoo is a deeply warm-hearted game.

Planet zoo exhibit animals