When You’re Determined To Find Some Cats, Accept No Substitute
For hidden cats fans – and there are literally dozens of us – A Tower Full of Cats is a bit of a hype-moment. A Castle Full of Cats and A Building Full of Cats were some of the first, if not THE first games to recognise that cats and messes go together perfectly. Its developer, Devcats, weren’t just pioneering on a very small, furry scale – they were also making excellent games in their own right. We’ve gotten used to the ‘Hidden Cats in…’ series being the top of the catpile, but that wasn’t always the case.
But no sooner did the ‘Full of Cats’ series appear, it promptly disappeared. The Full of Cats series hasn’t managed to release a new game in three years, when its peers have managed to release multiple games a year. We’ve waited patiently, but no new game has been seen. We assumed that the series had created the genre, dropped the mic, and then retired into the night.
A Towering Achievement
A Tower Full of Cats is the triumphant return. And we do mean triumphant. This isn’t just a continuation of the kind of games they produced before: this is a swipe of the paw that takes out most of its competitors, and confidently makes a claim for best of the genre. It’s not only a welcome return, but a masterful one.
I like to think that Devcats spent the past three years building A Tower Full of Cats brick by brick. The game starts at the foot of the titular tower, staring up at a construction that gets lost in fog. You need to find and click on a set number of cats to clear that fog and move upwards. This is the pattern of the game: find cats until the fog clears, and move on to claim the next section.
Each chunk of the tower is themed around a time period. The base of the tower is Paleolithic-themed, before moving into Egyptian, Medieval and Greek sections. At the top of the tower are modern-day and futuristic sections, peaking at a spaceship, which unlocks a couple more levels. There are hundreds of cats in each, with doors, holes and windows that lead to sub-sections where you can find more.
Time-travelling As You Ascend The Tower
The basic cat-finding is clear and well-handled. It eschews the ‘Hidden Cats in…’ approach of colouring in the background when you find a cat, choosing instead to offer a safety net of systems. You’re clearly told how many cats, hidden cats (those which need to be found behind secret panels and other obstructions), nuts and bolts are in the immediate section. Each cat, when found, is clearly coloured in, and a Hint system on a cooldown is a last-resort that doesn’t punish you in any way if you use it.
The hidden cats can be a little obscure. 90% of the time, there are neat clues that prompt you to poke at something. Cracks in bricks or graffiti on a mural might suggest that there is a cat hidden behind. But the remaining 10% are a little arbitrary. It can sometimes feel like you have to click on every brick or vase to find the hidden cats, which isn’t always a satisfying sensation.
Nuts and bolts are also hidden in the sketches (you’ll need a few of these to build the spaceship), and a helpful quest-item, gained about halfway through the game, makes these easier to find. There’s something challenging about the cognitive switch of moving from finding cats to finding nuts and bolts. For whatever reason, I would be utterly blind to them.
A Hidden Cat Game Mixed With RPGs And Metroidvanias?
But where A Tower Full of Cats’ magic lies is in its quests. Larger, quest-giving cats turn up to disrupt the whole mog-finding. You might be asked to find plastic bottles in the environment and stick them in a bin. Fish, bats and mice all need to be gathered. And when you find the last one, they invariably offer you a quest-item, which can be hauled back to a previous section of the tower to open something up. Gates and doors open, leading you to yet another scene.
It’s not quite a Metroidvania, but it’s borrowing some of the ideas. Ultimately, it makes the cat-finding more multi-dimensional. We’re so used to searching for felines in a static scene, or in a linear sequence – completing one level unlocks the next. But the flow of play in A Tower Full of Cats is so much more unpredictable. You can be moving up or down the tower to progress, jumping through windows or doors to find a quest item, then scooting back up again. I never realised how much I had missed being surprised and delighted in this genre until now.
Some elements of A Tower Full of Cats are so cutely surprising that talking about them is a little unfair. But let’s just say that A Tower Full of Cats refuses to end. We thought we had finished on three separate occasions, but Devcats twirled about, arched its eyebrow and revealed that it had tricked us. If you needed evidence that three years had been spent on A Tower Full of Cats then it’s here: there is such a surplus of stuff to do, and a determination to keep offering it, even after other games would have stopped. That £4.79, which might have seemed steep for a hidden cat game, looks positively paltry once you’ve seen the proper end credits.
From Kitten Of The Genre To Top Cat
By a stroke of luck, A Tower Full of Cats released on the same day as Hidden Cats in Barcelona; yet, it manages to make that game feel hollow in comparison. We love the Hidden Cats in… series, but A Tower Full of Cats looms high above it, offering an experience that will leave a hidden-cat fan completely satisfied. My house adored it. It’s been played by everyone in our family individually, front-to-back three times over.
If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many games on the Xbox Store that scatter some cats and ask you to find them, then play A Tower Full of Cats. It’s the best example of the genre to be found.
Important Links
A Tower Full of Cats Brings More Than 1,400 Felines To Console And Play Anywhere – https://www.thexboxhub.com/a-tower-full-of-cats-brings-more-than-1400-felines-to-console-and-play-anywhere/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/a-tower-full-of-cats/9pk1z7t54hhm
