What happened here?
The opening and first area gave a really positive impression. There's a lot of room to navigate the city in a catty way, climbing around on surfaces, scratching things, slipping through someone's legs when they're not paying attention to sneak into a building. For a bit, it seems like they really are interested in the questions about "what does it mean for a cat to navigate this world, how would they experience it".
After a certain point it feels like they've run out of ideas, and what they fall back on is the most boring gameplay tropes imaginable. One scene has you activating a loud elevator that slowly descends while you dodge zombies, like any 2006-era action game for the 360. In another you avoid flashlight beams in the most boring, by-the-numbers stealth sequence, with drones ready to shoot your little cat dead. They don't give you any sense of real tension, any narrative reasons to care about them, they're just boring and embarassing filler. Worse, they don't make any use at all of your being a cat. They seem to have forgotten to consider that maybe a cat might have different ways of moving through the world like in the open world sections. You could have made these exact scenes with a generic human and wouldn't have to change a single thing. I might have felt better about them if they didn't make up at least 75% of the game.
The story emphasizes that this isn't a story about a cat at all. The robot doesn't get the focus just because he can speak, but because they don't seem to have thought about the cat as being capable of having real emotions or motivations. The cat doesn't seem to want to go anywhere, doesn't seem to want to do anything. Aside from a couple of scenes where they're briefly injured, and one of the final scenes, the game doesn't really care about presenting the cat's emotional state at all. The developers don't seem to have had any confidence in their ability to tell a story about someone who's not human and how they experience the world, so they didn't even try. What they did make is as clichéd as I could imagine, and every single twist and attempt at an emotional moment is predictable and weakly told.
I felt a little better about the game before the final action scenes, which are so frustrating and so badly matched to the rest of the game that I just wanted it to be over.
The opening and first area gave a really positive impression. There's a lot of room to navigate the city in a catty way, climbing around on surfaces, scratching things, slipping through someone's legs when they're not paying attention to sneak into a building. For a bit, it seems like they really are interested in the questions about "what does it mean for a cat to navigate this world, how would they experience it".
After a certain point it feels like they've run out of ideas, and what they fall back on is the most boring gameplay tropes imaginable. One scene has you activating a loud elevator that slowly descends while you dodge zombies, like any 2006-era action game for the 360. In another you avoid flashlight beams in the most boring, by-the-numbers stealth sequence, with drones ready to shoot your little cat dead. They don't give you any sense of real tension, any narrative reasons to care about them, they're just boring and embarassing filler. Worse, they don't make any use at all of your being a cat. They seem to have forgotten to consider that maybe a cat might have different ways of moving through the world like in the open world sections. You could have made these exact scenes with a generic human and wouldn't have to change a single thing. I might have felt better about them if they didn't make up at least 75% of the game.
The story emphasizes that this isn't a story about a cat at all. The robot doesn't get the focus just because he can speak, but because they don't seem to have thought about the cat as being capable of having real emotions or motivations. The cat doesn't seem to want to go anywhere, doesn't seem to want to do anything. Aside from a couple of scenes where they're briefly injured, and one of the final scenes, the game doesn't really care about presenting the cat's emotional state at all. The developers don't seem to have had any confidence in their ability to tell a story about someone who's not human and how they experience the world, so they didn't even try. What they did make is as clichéd as I could imagine, and every single twist and attempt at an emotional moment is predictable and weakly told.
I felt a little better about the game before the final action scenes, which are so frustrating and so badly matched to the rest of the game that I just wanted it to be over.