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It's a dog-eat-dog kind of world out there. Not literally, in the case of Tokyo Jungle: cannibalism is one of the game's few taboos. But the fiery Pomeranian will happily bite his kin to death, even if he's forbidden from chowing down on the furry corpse thereafter. Figuratively then, it's a dog-eat-dog world. Literally? Well, literally Tokyo Jungle is more a dog-eat-cat, dog-eat-deer, dog-eat-hippopotamus, dog-eat-alligator kinda world.This tenet - eat them before they eat you - is so familiar to the video game devout that these days it passes almost unnoticed as the core message of the medium. From the dawn of video game time we have known to blast the Invaders before they blast us, to swallow the fruit and chase the Pac-Man ghosts back into a corner, to hoover up the health packs before our comrades get to them, to cast the first stone, throw the first punch, make the first headshot. This rule is part of the video game contract, one of the few human pursuits - alongside sport, perhaps - that repels notions of reconciliation or compromise.
But despite the familiarity, Tokyo Jungle manages to surprise by expressing the dog-eat-dog principle in its most unadorned, animalistic sense: removing the humans from modern Tokyo, unlocking the gates to the zoos and seeing what carnal carnage erupts from emancipating the animals. It's a good and fair premise. After all, man has had his turn at stewardship of planet Earth and look at how that's gone. We've choked and plundered and, a few thousand years on, the planet wheezes and staggers from our competitive selfishness. It's a man-eat-world kinda world in here: why not give the animals a shot?
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