I'd like to thank HH-Games for the review key to this title.

Now, there are a lot of professions that some may not know exist but are real and interesting. Dress-Up Pups is a Match-3 game that is themed around being a pet customer store clerk, and yes, there are specialty stores for buying a tutu or a graduation gown for your dog. The premise is quirky but interesting, and it's a decent Match-3 game too.

The story is really simple. Your boss is stepping out on vacation and leaves managing the store to you, telling you that if you do a good job, a promotion is in your future. Wanting this, your protagonist decides to work hard to earn it, especially by helping certain customers with their specialty orders for their dogs.

The game is largely a Match-3 game, where you must match 3 or more of certain types of items in a row to eventually clear a top-down puzzle board of whatever items the level requires you to remove. It also has an extra "puzzle" mode, where completing the Match-3 level grants you puzzle pieces you can complete into a picture, as the picture ties into the game story. Specifically, the picture is of the costumes you are designing for the pet orders you receive. Once the picture is completed, so is the order.

Like most Match-3 games, once you obtain a certain number of matches, you get extra board clearing tools, like a hammer, lightning bolt, and so on that clear certain segments of the board that may otherwise be hard to clear you can obtain as the game progresses. Clearing many tiles at once can also make various bomb tiles appear that will clear large chunks of the board much faster to help you out.

Graphically, it has a hand-drawn, Western cartoon style for the story scenes. The game board and background art, however, have an artsy look that resembles an oil painting, especially the cute background art of various dogs used in the various levels. The sounds and music are peppy, cheery music, nothing overly remarkable, but fits the lighthearted theme and complements the art.

Like most Match-3 games on PC, this is controlled almost entirely by mouse, the keyboard used only when inputting your name at the beginning. As for game stability, it runs well out of the box on Windows and can run more or less at native performance on Steam Proton for Linux users.

One big issue, however, is the widescreen option. It works, but implementation is buggy. It will crash the game with an error message if enabled, then if you restart, the game will be widescreen resized, but it looks grainy. I recommend not bothering with this option unless it's fixed and the scaling is improved.

From a moral standpoint, I found absolutely nothing to be concerned about. This game is free of violence, foul language, sexual content and has no occult or supernatural influences. The main objective is to do well at your job by doing honest customer service, which of course is completely ethical, so no issues on that score either.

Aside from the widescreen option not working well, this is a well-done Match-3 game in a technical sense. Morally, there is nothing offensive and this is safe for all ages. I'd get it on sale or part of a bundle, but it's not a bad game for its genre if you love Match-3 games.