- First person horror game with an emphasis on visuals.
- And outside of its visuals, it has almost nothing to offer.
- Puzzles are either obtuse or takes too long and just aren't clever really.
- "Weapons" if they are even that, are not fun to use and just serve as key doors sometimes.
- Outside of its visuals, unmemorable.

Unique atmosphere, a ton of talent in writing, sound design, visuals. Would absolutely love to read it as a book or a graphic novel, watch it as an indie film or an animation... Honestly, anything but a game.

As a game, it's an experience so excruciatingly boring and unengaging that I would literally rather do my stupid shitty job rather than play it. From what I saw in the first two Acts, your entire agency as a player is reduced to selecting artsy absurdist lines of dialogue from a couple of equally bewildering options, and it makes absolutely zero difference what you choose, because other characters or the environment react to these statements in equally absurdist poetic ways. It's like a crushingly slow beat poetry mad libs: the game.

When you're not doing that, you're either walking very slowly through a minimalistic environment or reading walls of cryptic text. That is, as far as I can tell, the entire game element of this critically acclaimed video game.

I have a high tolerance for boring art, I watch art house films, I've read and enjoyed difficult books, so I'm not asking for everything to be slop with robots, murder or swords. But the point of the games as a medium is interaction. If you want to make it artsy - more power to you, there are plenty of examples where that works perfectly. But if I'm playing a game, I want to have meaningful interaction with your cryptic pretentious world, I don't want to be a glorified page-turning mechanism.

If I wanted to read a book, I would read a book. In fact, this is exactly what I'm going to do after frustratingly closing this "game" for good.

Have you ever held a game so close to your heart that you can't bear to read negative reviews on it?

I'm not going to be the person who says "This game saved my life!", but I will say The Cat Lady did a lot for me.

I was 11 or 12 when I first watched a playthrough of this game. For the most part I was much too young to really understand the subtleties and overarching messages, but by that age I was already struggling with my mental health. I won't get into details, but I was already extremely depressed and deeply contemplating taking my own life.

I vividly remember watching the early part of The Cat Lady, where Susan wakes up in the afterlife and meets the Queen of Maggots, and it shook me to my fucking core. It scared me. It was the first time I'd been faced with the concept of suicide meaning I'd wake up somewhere bleak and terrifying and sinister and revolting, that it wouldn't be an escape to somewhere peaceful and relieving at all. I couldn't get it out of my head, couldn't stop thinking about the possibility of something like that being real - I was a kid with a very overactive imagination who often had night terrors at the slightest glimpse of a Scary Thing or piece of media, and my brain took this and ran with it.

And I was too scared to go through with it. I was, unironically, too scared to risk meeting this fucking maggot lady.

And, God, was I pissed at this game. I hated it. I was so incredibly angry that it had scared me away from what I'd been viewing as a solution. If I just hadn't watched it, if I just hadn't experienced this story, I would've been able to do it.

My memory of it and my fear faded over the years, and I would go on to indeed attempt suicide several times. The last time would be the worst, and I ended up in intensive care for two weeks with doctors trying to save my internal organs from shutting down.

And then I came out the other side. That was two years ago now, and I can now say with full honesty I don't want to die anymore. In fact, sometimes I'm even brave enough to call myself happy. I'm engaged to a wonderful fiancee, I have a solid support network of amazing friends who care about me, my confidence is growing, and I'm proud of who I've become and am becoming.

And so I played this game again.

The Cat Lady is heavy on the heart. It's not a light game you can play on stream, or sink into to take your mind off reality. It's a visceral and real look into the psyche of a depressed, bitterly suicidal woman, and it doesn't make her palatable for you. Susan is resentful, she's cynical, she's reclusive and messy and often rude. But her journey, through her mission and her friendship with Mitzi and her backstory unfurling to the player and her love for her cats and her mental health and her path to learn to live again - it's so, so special. It's really something for a game so unabashedly raw and unfiltered to leave you with a sense of genuine hope and optimism and appreciation for life when the credits roll.

At 11, I hated The Cat Lady for forcing me to live, and now at almost 24 I love it for being here while I learn to do it myself. It took us 13 years to do it, but Susan and I climbed that insurmountable cliff side by side, and for that I'll always sing this game's praises.