A Mostly Fine Cat-Hunting Game That Represents a Step Up for the Series
If you’re wondering who must be buying all of these ‘hidden cats’ games, then I sheepishly hold my hand up. I mean, you can’t play Forza Horizon 6 every day. I don’t even have a strong excuse: there’s just something rewarding about scanning a picture systematically for cats, poking any that I see, and watching the picture get speckled with coloured felines. If I said that I didn’t enjoy it, I would be lion.
I play so many of them that I even have a mental hierarchy of all the hidden cat games (there really are that many). Cats and Seek games sit somewhere in the middle of the table. They’re too short to really get your teeth into, too lacking in personality to truly charm, but they get the job done. They’re usually the cheapest of the bunch too. Cats and Seek: Tokyo will set you back £2.49, for example. You lose that much money when you walk out the door nowadays.
Shy Cats < Cats and Seek < Hidden Cats In…
Cats and Seek: Tokyo is a play for the top-half of that mental hierarchy. It’s better than the rest of the Cats and Seek output. It’s more substantial, feels more like a space I want to search through, and has some usability improvements to boot. It’s pretty good.
Cats and Seek gets some of its charm from setting itself in Tokyo. You get to search through Asakusa, Akihabara, Ueno Park, Shibuya and Kamakura for cats. It’s a more coherent, recognisable theme than Cats and Seek usually go for. Weebs will get a kick out of finding cats in vending machines, temples and Shibuya Station.
The mini-stories in the pictures are better than usual, too. I liked how a cat hidden among some wide-eyed statues also had a wide-eyed look on its face. These aren’t cats that have been copy and pasted into their environment: they have been drawn in context.
Outwitted by Kittens
Cats and Seek: Tokyo is a little partial to adding cats that are inordinately tiny. You will often find cats that are just a face or ear. The felines also like to hide in repeated patterns or tiled effects. It can make you go cross-eyed as you try to find a single cat face among some bricks, for example. Whether or not this is a plus or a minus is up to you: I enjoyed the extra difficulty, but my wife thought it verged on cheating on the part of the devs.
There are 105 cats to be found in each of the five scenes. That’s a decent number to find, so Cats and Seek: Tokyo will have your attention for two hours rather than the usual four. There are also 16 stamps to locate in each scene, which represents a bit of a context-switch. You need to remember that you are looking for them as well as the cats.
I can’t completely remember whether Cats and Seek incorporated it in their previous titles, but there’s a helpful ‘miaow’ when you have caught 90+ cats and you are after the remaining few. It gives you a little ping and an acknowledgment that you are on the right track. It’s helpful usability when looking for the last cat in a large scene could have been a bit needle-haystacky.
Cats and Seek: Tokyo is holding out on the whole ‘colouring in the scene’, though. In series like Hidden Cats in…, the games will colour in swathes of the environment once you have found all the cats in that area. It’s not only a helpful prompt, but it feels like a joyful reward too. Cats and Seek: Tokyo opts not to include it, only colouring in the cats. I’d argue that it’s a missed trick. Cats and Seek: Tokyo would be so much better if this feature was included.
As with the other games in the series, I can’t help feeling that Cats and Seek considers stuff important that just, well, isn’t. A lot of effort is spent on letting the player change a host of colour options. You can change the colour of the cats, the scene, the pencil outlines – everything. You can even change the cursor to be your choice of carrot, lollipop or other icon. But I’d love to know if many players bother outside of the achievements and those that improve accessibility. Even the collectible stamps unlock stickers and I just can’t see anyone using them.
Ain’t Nobody Playing Timed Mode
A similar feeling emanates from the timed mode. You can play the levels with a stopwatch, showing off your ability to spot mogs at speed. The cats aren’t randomised – they’re in the positions that they were in the normal mode – so it’s mostly a test of your click speed. But even if you were invested, there’s no highscore table, so you can’t really compare scores.
It leaves Cats and Seek: Tokyo feeling a little one-note. The five scenes are reminiscent of each other, and you’re doing the same things in each of them. Once they’re done, they’re done: unless you really do fancy doing it all over again with a timer ticking up.
The asterisk is that Cats and Seek: Tokyo is £2.49. It really isn’t much for people like me who, for inexplicable reasons, need that small shot of cat-finding. And Cats and Seek: Tokyo finds the series progressing things forward rather than resting on its laurels. The scenes have more character, and the Japanese backdrop ties things nicely together. Some usability improvements are the cherry, It’s rare to be infuriated as you hunt the last few cats.
Tokyo’s Finest
Cats and Seek: Tokyo won’t trouble the Hidden Cats in… series, which sits at the top of the tower licking its paws. But there’s enough here to suggest that Cats and Seek isn’t going to just churn out cat game after cat game. This is the best one in the series yet, and for £2.49 it’s a welcome break from whichever AAA monster you are playing right now.
Important Links
Cats and Seek Heads To Tokyo For Its Latest Adventure – https://www.thexboxhub.com/cats-and-seek-heads-to-tokyo-for-its-latest-adventure/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/cats-and-seek-tokyo/9P4DRHVMW4JW/0010
