It’s not what you think. This isn’t a FromSoftware-style Souls game with cats. But now it’s popped into our heads, it’s all we want. The Old Mog boss from Demon Souls, Lady Meowria of the Astral Clocktower from Bloodborne – imagine! This stuff writes itself.
What Cat Souls is, instead, is an action platformer with a unique take on death. The ‘Souls’ in the title, rather than being a reference to that other rather successful series, is a reference to a cat’s many lives. It uses the belief that cats have more than one life as a gimmick to separate it from other indie platformers.
In Cat Souls, you have seven lives (not the traditional nine lives, presumably because nine would be too easy). Let’s imagine that the main cat character has already spent them on a brush with a doberman and Renault Clio. But they’re a pretty versatile seven lives, as they get replenished. As soon as you pass through the door that represents the end of the level, they come back.
You might be wondering how this is original, since pretty much every game has a concept of lives or respawning. Well, when the little cat in Cat Souls dies, a ‘spirit’ appears, and that spirit can be used as a platform. It’s not our idea of an afterlife, to become a step for Mario, but we’ll run with it. With that platform in play, you can now access areas that were previously out of reach.
It’s a simple idea that Cat Souls initially has a lot of fun with. Large chasms are suddenly spannable with a well planned suicide. Other chasms have spinning blades which chop through your spectral shelf, so you have to time your death well. It’s great, mostly because it has you breaking simple rules of platforming: you want to die, and your deaths can progress you, rather than hold you back.
But the thing is, like a cat with a new toy, Cat Souls gets bored surprisingly quickly with the idea. The notion of dying to create platforms sticks around, but it kind of loiters in the background rather than being something that the game builds on. Which, if we’re being completely honest, is something of a shame. The death mechanic separates Cat Souls from the mountain of indie platformers that we play, but then it gets unceremoniously ditched.
Part of the problem is that Cat Souls makes the effect too narrow. A soul only appears when you die in a spike trap. No soul appears when you stray into an enemy or fireball, nor when you plummet down a hole. It doesn’t take much imagination to think of effects that would suit: die by fireball, and the platform could be a wall that blocks said fireball. Why didn’t Cat Souls go down that route? Possibly because it would have made the game too puzzly, or too easy. Regardless, it loses a little of its identity in the process.
There is a happy ending to this story. Because while we were disappointed that Cat Souls took a turn to the generic, it has a pretty damn good bash at being generic. Cat Souls may become like every other platformer, but it’s a stylish, polished and still rather surprising example of one. It’s like accidentally wandering into Barbie after you bought tickets to Oppenheimer, but still having a whale of a time.
The objective is the same as ninety percent of these kinds of games. You have a level, and the aim is to reach the exit. That exit, more often than not, is locked, so you need to get a key too. Cat Souls applies a couple of limits to keep things interesting: you also have the set number of lives, as well as a ticking clock for completing the level.
At the start, the levels are on the simple side, with blades on set-paths and cannons firing projectiles on timers. The skills that are being tested are your platforming precision and patience, as you wait for the best time to sally forth and then pull it off with aplomb.
While it may involuntarily trigger a yawn, it’s got game. The art is brash and arcadey, looking like a peak SNES game that has been remastered for modern audiences. And, more importantly, the controls and gameplay are on point. Everything is pulled off as it should be, with no latency, collision detection or difficulty spike problems. This is a lean mean platforming machine.
It then starts dishing up new ideas every few levels or so. They’re not completely original like the death-platform concept, but they’re still enough to stoke the fires. Platforms appear that can be jumped on to change their direction. Gravity-switching crystals yoink you onto the ceiling and back. Even the colour-scheme gets a complete shift, as Cat Souls has a Kill Bill moment where everything turns into silhouettes. Like a true feline, Cat Souls has moves as well as style.
Achievement hunters should note that the 1000G tops out at level twenty of forty-five, so there’s not a huge demand on your time. It’s a shame that many Gamerscore hounds will likely drop out then, as the difficulty and the ideas really dial up from thereon in. Keep playing if you can, as it’s worth it.
Still, we’d have taken something that encouraged replay or paying more attention. This is a game that cries out for collectibles or level rankings, as it’s entirely possible to finish in a faster time or with fewer deaths. But Cat Souls has its eyes facing fully forwards, only expecting you to complete the forty-five levels and then ship out. Perhaps we have to wait for Cat Souls 2 before that happens.
What a strange experience playing Cat Souls was. Our interest curve would look a little like a ski slope. We loved the pitch of using the titular ‘souls’ as platforms, yet Cat Souls does next to nothing with it, leaving us deflated. But over the levels, we realised what had happened. The designers had been distracted by other ideas, as if a sudden laser pointer dot had appeared. And while those ideas weren’t as original as the opening gambit, they combined to create a stylish, restless little platformer.
Is it worth the trade? We’re not entirely sure, but we’re happy that we got to roll around with it for a while.
