A Gorgeous Hidden Cat Game That’s Over in Two Flicks of a Cat’s Tail
Is there room for one more hidden cat series? Find the Cats believes so, as it strides confidently onto the Xbox Store.
It’s encouraging that Find the Cats is trying something new. Where most hidden cat games opt for illustrations, like the Cats and Seek and Hidden Cats in… series, Find the Cats goes the pixel route. Each of its scenes is a detailed 2D pixel diorama that wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1990s graphic adventure.
The result is new and fresh for the hidden cats subgenre, but nostalgic and familiar if you’re an older gamer. I wanted to stick around in each scene, collecting items and using them together like I was on a cat-themed island of Monkey Island. The images are independently lovely, and have the depth and detail that make you want to frame them, or stick them in a coffee table art book.
Meowniac Mansion
Tucking ten cats into each level almost felt like a waste. Finding ten cats doesn’t take long (there’s a reason that there is a ‘find 10 cats in less than 15 seconds’ achievement), which means each scene hurtles past before you’ve really had a chance to absorb it. I have a vague notion that I went to fantastical places, like swamps and a wizard’s laboratory, but I was there barely long enough for them to register. I kind of wanted to stick around and admire the view.
This hints at a problem that Find the Cats never manages to resolve. The cats in Find the Cats are incredibly easy to spot. I’m not sure whether that’s down to the pixel art – the levels are lit so well that there’s such an obvious contrast between cat and backdrop – or the placement of the cats, as they all seem to ‘pop’ out of their surroundings. Only a few cats really challenged us, as they were more silhouettes than cats. The rest were glaring.
That’s not necessarily a problem in other hidden cat games. There are often easy-to-spot cats in scenes within those games. But they tend to mitigate the problem in one of two ways: they either give you a LOT of cats, so you inevitably miss one or two, or they mix up the visible cats with hidden ones. Find the Cats doesn’t seem to have the luxury. There are only ten cats per scene, and Find the Cats can’t find a way to make its cats more hidden. So you’re finding them easily, and at speed.
Spotted in 60 Seconds
Find the Cats’ solution – I think – is to embrace the speed. I say ‘I think’ because it doesn’t explicitly ask you to catch the cats quickly, outside of one achievement. But I felt the nudge. The scenes don’t scroll beyond what’s onscreen; the number of cats is small; the levels quickly move from one to the other.
Speed gives Find the Cats a different feel, but that feeling is less cozy. For many players, cozy is half the point: they want to wind down with some cat-poking, not tap into a vein of adrenaline. It makes Find the Cats more niche, I suspect – a cat-seeking game for people who want to set themselves challenges, who play games like Hidden Cats in… with an internalised stopwatch.
Playing at speed damages Find the Cats in a different way. We averaged 15 seconds per level, and there are 30 levels here. Checking my rough maths, that means you are spending 7.5 minutes playing it from beginning to end. Regardless of how much Find the Cats costs, that’s not a lot of entertainment.
If there were highscore tables, randomised cats or extra things to spot in each level, that shorter time would feel less problematic. But there are only the cats to spot, and we whipped through the 30 levels within the half-time period of a World Cup match. We were slightly bemused, checking the menus for more ways that we could play Find the Cats. We wanted to: we didn’t feel like we had wrung every drop out of the lovely pixel scenes.
The Tiniest of Cat Treats
Having played oodles of hidden cat games on the Xbox – more than I have toes or fingers on my paws – I was excited to try something new. Find the Cats certainly doesn’t take the easy route of copying what went before. The scenes are pocket pixel-art masterpieces, and the slider moves towards finding cats at speed, rather than treating the scenes as puzzles.
But Find the Cats has a problem to solve in future sequels. With backgrounds this beautiful, it needs to let you enjoy them. But there’s no time to take them in: with only ten, easy-to-spot cats per scene, you are moving through them at speed and, within ten minutes, the entire game is over. There’s nothing to bring you back, no reason to play them at a more laid-back tempo.
When Find the Cats manages to clear this hairball – the lack of challenge, reasons to replay and oddly fast tempo – it could be an attractive alternative to all the other hidden cat games. For now, it’s better as a series of art-prints than a video game.
Important Links
Start Hunting For Hidden Felines In Find The Cats – https://www.thexboxhub.com/start-hunting-for-hidden-felines-in-find-the-cats/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/find-the-cats/9N1JQ8KSKCWB/0010
Buy an Xbox One version – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/find-the-cats-xbox-one/9P8K9K8NNX7N/0010
There’s a Windows PC drop too – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/find-the-cats-windows/9PJBZLMHH9XS/0010
