Cryptozookeeper

Interactive Friction
Downloading the hefty (by text adventure standards) 500MB package gives you a Hugo interpreter (yes, Hugo) and a data file. Load one with the other and you're up and running. Immediately you are greeted by multimedia! There is music! There are pictures! The pictures change! Yes folks, in 2011 we can now replicate what Magnetic Scrolls was doing in 1983. Progress! So, now understanding the reason for the file size, you can crank up the volume and sit back, absorbing some pretty damn good ambient techno beats, some with voice samples. There is a decent number of tracks, ensuring you won't be hearing the same number over and over in one session, and they do provide a great atmosphere that perfectly fits with the world of CRYPTOZOOKEEPER. Yes, you can switch the sound off, but you would be losing a large chunk of the experience without it. [...]
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Rock Paper Shotgun
Splice of Life: Cryptozookeeper
You find some odd things, poking around the dusty corners of the internet. Take Cryptozookeeper, a darkly comic splatterpunk interactive fiction adventure with grisly Pokemon type elements. It sounds like an unholy abomination of game types but for the most part it’s a narrative interspersed with fairly conventional puzzles. The story isn’t conventional at all though. It starts with a courier collecting some alien DNA from a rundown shack containing a large one-eyed man and his pet bear-dog, Puzzle, and swiftly becomes increasingly deranged. Later on you’ll be merging DNA to make battle-beasts even more uncanny than a duckbilled platypus but first you just need to deal with that bear-dog. The game is free to download although there is a deluxe copy for sale, which comes on discs in a box like olden times. [...]
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robohara.com
Review: Cryptozookeeper
Like most gamers, I drifted away from the world of text adventures around the time graphics, sound and joysticks were invented. I played my share of text-based games in the early 1980s, but quickly moved on to “the graphical stuff” and didn’t revisit the genre until my interest was re-piqued by Jason Scott’s documentary Get Lamp. [...]
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IF-Review
We Eat The Night, We Drink The Time
This game is definitely not for everybody. If you find gore and repulsive behavior too upsetting, avoid it. Similarly, if repetitive RPG combat makes you want to shoot yourself, stay healthy by not playing this game. For me, though, IF that makes me laugh over and over again, and occasionally astounds me with something sublime or defiantly ridiculous, can be forgiven of almost any sin. Cryptozookeeper is that kind of IF. It's Robb Sherwin at the top of his very strange game, and I'm glad I finally figured out how to enjoy that.
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Sub-Q
Cryptozookeeper: Inside the Red House
“Someone make sure Eeyore there has herself a nice long gulp!” You’re not sure who said it. It could be any one of your friends. It could even be you! -Cryptozookeeper

Sometimes, the moments that stick with you from a game—for years, even decades—are not significant moments in the game itself. Instead, they’re the off-hand moments when a space is created inside a game that feels extremely ephemeral.
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