The 3D Cat-Finding Game That I’ve Been Waiting For
Don’t be tricked by the camera on the store pages for Cat Me If You Can. This is not a photography game – not really. You don’t get to create fanciful compositions and soft-focus pictures of the cats. You don’t get to flick through a photo album of all your best shots. And you certainly can’t go off the beaten path and take a selfie next to an artful sunset, mostly because Cat Me If You Can refuses to register it as a viable photo. This is no Lushfoil Photography Sim.
Cat Me If You Can may look like it’s being marketed as a photography game, but it is instead a hidden cat game. The camera is just a means of tagging the cats you find. As long as they’re in range and in shot, you can colour-in the cat with a quick tap of your shutter button. The ‘total cat’ counter goes down, and you can move on to the next feline – perhaps one that you’ve spotted, just down the path.
Hidden Cats, Shmidden Cats
I was quite happy with the wee pivot. I play a disgusting number of hidden cat games – which I can’t complain about, since I seem to be first in the queue to get them – and Cat Me If You Can is very much of that oeuvre. Even better, it takes the exciting 3D step. This isn’t a hidden cat game where you pore over a flat illustration, Where’s Wally-style. This is a bevy of 3D spaces, all huge, inviting and absolutely riddled with felines. It’s a big step beyond the hidden cat games that I’ve been playing, week in, week out.
Cat Me If You Can is split into three Crystal Maze-like zones. You start off in the Land of the Rising Meow, which – if you don’t quite get the pun – is the Japanese area. This goes backwards and forwards in time, taking you from the Tokyo-like environment of The Striped Metropolis, all the way to the temples and shogunates of Nyanto. The Meowdieval Era is a spot of Western European medieval villages and castles, while Purramid Kingdom swoops you into and out of pyramids and tombs, thoroughly embracing both modern and ancient Egyptian motifs. The three zones are varied and surprisingly authentic/immersive, which is an impressive achievement considering that they’re simply rendered and in greyscale.
More Cats Than You Could Possibly Swing Round Your Head
The vast majority of Cat Me If You Can is spent hunting cats, and this aspect really couldn’t be any simpler. Spot a cat, whip out the camera, get it at least a little in focus, then tap the shutter button. Confetti fires off and you’ve added one more to various tallies. Each level is broken up into subsections, helpfully represented by a floating noticeboard, and there are three levels per zone.
As much as I’ve snarked about the inclusion of a camera, it gives the cat-spotting a lovely tactile quality. The confetti, colour, photo and tallying all happen at the same time, giving the moment a satisfying punch. The cats themselves aren’t hugely characterful – they don’t have independent personalities like in some other hidden cat games – but they’re often posed in fun ways, and the designers love to cheekily tuck them onto islands or on housing beams. They’re all clear enough that you kick yourself if you don’t spot them, but they’re not so evident that it’s too easy.
The levels themselves deserve plaudits. I didn’t expect them to be so sprawling. They’re big enough that I get turned around occasionally, and they definitely give me the whole ‘which way to go’ anxiety. Doors and stairs keep cropping up, adding layers to the level just as I think I’ve explored everything. The Striped Metropolis loves to take you to the top of skyscrapers and onto scaffolding; Clawpatra’s Tomb has you locating and opening hidden entrances. I’d try to build a mental map (Cat Me If You Can, alas, doesn’t come with one that’s useful), so that I could check off where I’d been.
Unexpected Questing
Cat Me If You Can could have left it here and I would have been happy. There’s probably about eight hours of gameplay in the cat-finding alone, and I was having a merry old time. But Cat Me If You Can wants to be more than a mere hidden cat game, so it throws in some quests.
The quests aren’t going to make The Witcher panic, but they’re a satisfying additional layer. On occasion, you come across 3D models that look slightly out of place, mostly because they’ve had more attention lavished on them than the average decorative piece. These items are either photographed or picked up, and they contribute towards one of five quests in the level. You might need to pick up several instruments, perhaps, or photograph some armour pieces. Find them all, and something will happen: an area will open up, or a building-high cat will suddenly appear. You take their photograph, and the quest is done.
I have some very, very minor quibbles about the quests. Sometimes they merge a little too much into the environment, and aren’t wholly discernible from the average object. I also don’t know why they are arbitrarily photographed OR picked up, when Cat Me If You Can would have been better if it picked a side. But they add something that Cat Me If You Can dearly needed, and that’s a degree of surprise: you don’t quite know where they will be, what form they will take, and what will happen when you’ve found them all.
Mopping Up Mogs Could Be Better
Cat Me If You Can is less good when it comes to mopping up the final cats or quest items. If you are a completionist, and want to find that last outlier, then you have two choices. One is the noticeboard, which helpfully tells you the quest items in the area and the number of missing cats. It’s brilliant, but also doesn’t define its own boundaries. It can be a little difficult to know the extent of the region. Or you can use the hint ‘ping’ system, which – apparently – tells you where hidden stuff is located. I grew to resent the system a tad, as the rules of it aren’t wholly clear (I think it pings only one cat, and only if it’s in a certain radius), but in my experience it would act like a sulky child. Sometimes it would show me something, sometimes it would not. It certainly wouldn’t highlight more than one, and the long cooldown made me irritable. It made finding the final few cats more frustrating than it needed to be.
But like a lounging cat next to a smashed vase, I can’t be mad at it for long. Cat Me If You Can is a laid-back, immersive joy from start to finish. I’ve been waiting for a polished 3D cat-finding game for an age now (the ones on Roblox don’t quite cut it), and I can say with utmost confidence that Cat Me If You Can is THAT game.
Cat Me If You Can is laden with more levels than I expected, and those levels are sprawling and full of secrets. The quests add moments of surprise, and the cats are a joy to find. I left the experience like a cat who got the cream, carrying a hope that more levels will arrive in the future. The thought of this being the end has got my hair raised and my claws out.
Important Links
Buy from Steam – https://store.steampowered.com/app/3170490/Cat_Me_If_You_Can/
