Cat-tastrophe!

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Is it possible that I'm the only person on the Internet who prefers dogs to cats? It certainly seems so. I feel the urge to protest against this onslaught of cat lovers. I intend to do so by writing a piece on three games that star cats. I am not a clever man.

Although Terry Cavanagh's ChatChat may seem like an exercise in self-indulgence at first, it has proven to be a simple yet clever deconstruction of the MMO genre. It is a moderately massive multiplayer game about being a cat, and doing what cats do best - wandering about, leaving dead mice at your doorstep and... well, that's it. Save for exploration, hunting for mice and fetching them is the only thing to do, which is done for the sake of itself. You see what he did there? It's also possible to become a dog, which is meant to be a curse as far as I can tell, since it can be lifted by transferring it to another player. A game of dog-tag, if you will. Head over to Kongregate if you wish to give it a try.


Next up is The Cat That Got The Milk, a two-button game that has you guiding an abstract cat to the abstract milk, through an abstract landscape. Not in a bad way, mind you. The levels are comprised of simple shapes and colours, soothing and unobtrusive, accompanied by an ambient soundtrack by Chris Randle (available for free on his bandcamp page). It's a short experience, that will take no more than 10 minutes of your time. This doesn't mean that it's easy, though. It gets progressively harder, and good reflexes are desirable. Still, they aren't necessary, since the game offers you a chance to skip a level every time it decides you're failing much too often.


Last but not least, A Walk In The Dark. This one is not out yet, but should be sometime this year. The culprit is a small Portuguese dev team, and the theme is cat heroism. The protagonist is a skinny feline called Bast, whose owner has been kidnapped by a scary smoke/mist thing. And now he has to save her by jumping onto platforms, sliding through tight spaces and avoiding spikes at all cost. The authors boast of it's story driven nature, but all I can tell from looking at this lovely video is that it follows the Silhouette School of Thought.


Now, can someone please make a game about a dog? A tie-in for Christopher Nolan's gritty remake of Lassie, perhaps?


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