An Encouraging Start for a New Format of Hidden Cat Game
Hidden cat games assume that cats want to be found. My experience with cats is that they’d rather you left them alone, thank you very much. I like to imagine that each cat gives a hiss of dissatisfaction whenever they’re spotted.
Secret Paws – Cozy Apartments isn’t like the other hidden act games. The convention is that hidden cat games are in 2D, finding felines in illustrations, but Secret Paws – Cozy Apartments is neither 2D or a drawing. It’s a 3D hidden cat game, modelled rather than sketched, where you effectively hold an apartment room in your hands and pivot it round. You might not be able to see a cat from a particular perspective, so you have to swivel the room round with a tap of the LB or RB button.
Cats in the Third Dimension
This 3D approach to finding cats fits their personality perfectly. The cats aren’t just hiding, they are moving vases, towels and socks into position so that they can’t be seen, even from three out of four perspectives. Some of the cats are even hidden within things. You have to jostle them first before they pop up. That’s more like how real cats hide.
We relied on a systemic approach to finding the cats. There are four different directions that you can turn the room, so we would choose one and then start sweeping up and down. Every last container would be tapped in case there was a mog in there, and we’d open drawers and then shut them once we’d rummaged through them. Then we’d tap LB, move to the next viewpoint and do the same. If that means opening the same drawers again, we would do it: cats love to hide at the front of a drawer where they can only be seen from behind the particular furniture.
Secret Paws – Cozy Apartments makes this process really rather enjoyable. Cats get painted purple and glow once they’ve been hunted down. They purr on being poked, and they jump out of any mugs or pots that they’ve been found in. There’s something joyful about basically doing the opposite of Unpacking: you are making a mess and finding cats within it. Rooms end up looking like a bomb has hit.
And the Cat Came Back the Very Next Day
There is a caveat, and it’s that some cats are already purple. I don’t know who thought that was a good idea: there’s a whole rainbow to play with, so why would you paint hidden cats in the same colour as found cats? It’s a bizarre hiccup, and the source of a little frustration.
I soon learned where my feline blind spots were. I’ve already mentioned cats at the front of drawers, but I also seem to have a problem spotting grey cats with their bums pointing at me. There’s something about the combo of drab colour and lack of ears that means I fail to spot them. But you learn to accommodate. I would go on a grey sweep as the last step on any level.
I like how consistent the rules are. There aren’t one or two cats that need to be found through opening or poking things – there are dozens. You learn to tap everything, and that becomes second nature. There are little rules like pictures always needing to be lifted from the wall (there are a surprising number of holes and safes), or window sills being a hotbed of cats. If there’s a plant, you can be sure there’s a green cat hidden in the foliage.
If you’re anything like us, you will end your search with three or four of the eighty-or-so cats still to be found. This is where the game’s hint system comes in. You can trigger a prompt to a cat, and that prompt goes on a timer. It’s theoretically great but needs more work. It’s surprisingly hard to find the cat that’s being highlighted, often because it’s only visible from certain perspectives. We’d enter a kind of panic after pressing the hint button. We would tap LB quickly, hoping that we’d find the cat before the highlight stopped flashing.
We got the Itch for Hunting More Than Cats
Secret Paws – Cozy Apartments dabbles in something that I wish they did more of. On occasion, you will find keys and combinations, and these open rooms or secret stashes. It’s a lovely touch that wakes you up a little: maybe you should actually be paying attention to stuff beyond felines. But there’s only a few instances of these, and I would have loved more. Some puzzling would have broken up the slight sense of monotony.
That monotony comes from the game’s title. Secret Paws – Cozy Apartments keeps solely to living spaces, and it’s the game’s biggest issue. The levels bleed into one another because they are solely living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms. That might have been enough if there was some purr-sonality to the rooms, but there isn’t. I couldn’t tell you if the bedrooms belonged to a woman or man, someone young or someone old, because there aren’t really any identifiers in there. Props repeat in every apartment.
We understand why: there’s already a lot of models, and producing some that are only in one room would be serious work. But Secret Paws – Cozy Apartments dearly needed some character to peek through. I think of Unpacking and how the furniture and props told a story about their owners, and that’s not the case here. There are 14 rooms here, and they’re largely interchangeable.
One of Those Times Where We’re Eager for a Sequel
Perhaps that’s something for Secret Paws 2. There’s something that can be built on here: pivoting a 3D space to find cats worked extremely well, and the art style fits that function. We’re tired of finding 2D cats in over-sized pictures, so rummaging in a 3D diorama is fresh. The basics are all there.
The next step is to make the spaces enjoyable to explore, or varied at the very least. The apartments all feel like they have been rented by the same person – someone who really loves potted plants and towels – and that doesn’t have to be the case. Once the rooms start telling their own stories, Unpacking-style, then I think Secret Paws – Cozy Apartments could be something very good indeed.
Important Links
The Ultimate Cat Hunt Begins In Secret Paws – Cozy Apartments – https://www.thexboxhub.com/the-ultimate-cat-hunt-begins-in-secret-paws-cozy-apartments/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/secret-paws-cozy-apartments/9pggjg8xdldq
