Cat Quest is a light and fluffy ARPG, set in a sprawling land of cartoony cat-people. It’s centered around a flatpack captured damsel/save-the-kingdom story, in which also there are suddenly dragons around and you’re the only cat around who can kill them, maybe, making you Dragonborn Dragonblood. Skyrim Cat Quest has cheery and straightforward dialogue filled to bursting with cat wordplay, wherein every suitable syllable is replaced with ‘paw’ or ‘meow’ or ‘purr’ or ‘nyan’ or ‘fur’ or you get the idea. It is funny, not funny, then funny again.
The core loop is mindlessly absorbing. Do quests. Kill enemies. Collect colourfall dopamine globules of gold and experience. Buy weapons, upgrade your spells, watch your stats rise with your levels. Do harder quests. Repeat. Slowly move through the main quest.
For an RPG, there’s very little specialisation or character complexity. The loot system is neat and simple, with upgraded versions of older weapons automatically replacing old ones in your inventory, so you don’t end up with twenty redundant copies of the same shitty halberd. The combat system, too, is diablo-lite. Hit enemies, cast spells, roll away before they hit/cast on you. Repeat. Hack attacks auto-target and spells are all area of effect. It’s enough that combat is just something I’m happy to do as part of the loop, but — much like the rest of the game — not mechanically all that engaging or rewarding, with limited strategic variation seemingly available.
The cartoon graphics are bright, clean and pleasant. The chirpy orchestral soundtrack seems good in the sense that I seem to have been listening to the same theme on loop without getting irritated. The dialogue is all short, snappy and to the point.
Still, there are signs everywhere of limited resources stretched to fit a large space. The same few faces and character models for every peasant of every town. The single tileset for every flat dungeon. The way nearly most sidequests, no matter the set-up, ends up asking the player to clear a particular dungeon of every creep. The limited terrain variation to be found in this big, green land of cats. The absence of developed NPCs.
It’s these limitations which kept tickling my self-awareness as to the loop I was in. It felt like if the game wasn’t going to bother justifying, to me, why I should be doing the things in it beyond the barest of apparent motivations, why should I be justifying it to myself? I found Cat Quest absorbing enough for the few half-hour bursts I played it in, but never in a way that I felt particularly anything about after the fact. It’s a game for playing while waiting for something else, a game for commutes or lunchbreaks, and in those terms it’s been well designed and I think of it rather fondly. But I don’t regret not finding more than a couple of hours for it this past week.
About: Cat Quest came out in August 2017 but appeared in my library just a month ago (September 2019), riding in on the back of a Humble RPG bundle that I mainly bought for Tyranny. Cat Quest was made by The Gentlebros [site], a small Singapore-based team of ex-Koei Tecmo devs. I enjoyed reading the couple of Cat Quest dev pieces on their website – one a post-mortem about the kinds of design compromises they made to create an ARPG suitable for phones, consoles and PCs, the other about how the feline theme and characters were adapted from a very different “dancing game” they’d ended up scrapping. Apparently there’s a sequel, Cat Quest 2, which launched just last month, and looks much like the first but with co-op.
