I left the one that looked the most fun 'til last, along with another that
looked pretty intriguing. I was pretty much on the money with both, although
it's worth remembering that "fun" only takes you so far and
"intrigue" is not a synonym for "enjoyment".
For once, I don't have one whole heck of a lot to say about either of them, so this might genuinely run short for a change, even if my playthroughs didn't. I'll start with the one I didn't really enjoy all that much:
Underground Blossom.
Add to that the stylized graphics that bring to mind the darkly comic work of Edward Gorey and what's not to like, right? Well, I'll tell you what's not to like: the puzzles.
First off, I should make it clear I'm not a big fan of puzzles in adventure
games to begin with. At best I see them as necessary time-fillers, without which
there wouldn't be anything you could reasonably call a "game". That
would suit me quite nicely but I appreciate the developers have to market and
sell these things to keep a roof over their heads and currently there doesn't
seem to be much of a channel for interactive narratives other than gaming,
meaning everything has to be constructed as a game of some sort, no matter how lacking in ludicity it may be.
The strong impression I got from the demo of Underground Blossom was that the developers were considerably more interested in the puzzles than they were in the narrative, making this primarily a puzzle game, not an adventure. I generally avoid anything that self-identifies as a "puzzle game" so it had the twin effect of making me feel I'd been misled by the marketing and also that I'd wasted one of my demo slots on something I would otherwise have skipped.
Still, it wouldn't have mattered all that much if I'd found the puzzles involving or engaging or convincing. I didn't find them to be any of those things.
Instead, I found them contrived, awkward, unconvincing and annoying. I'm well aware that the setting is both surreal and dreamlike, two unchallengable pass cards for having anything happen, regardless of logic or sanity, but that doesn't make it fun.
Worse yet, the mechanics behind the puzzles seemed inflexible. I had to restart my first playthrough because, as it turned out, I'd done something out of sequence and there didn't appear to be any way to undo the action or take an alternative path.
I was only able to find out what had gone wrong by consulting a walkthrough,
which told me that I needed to feed a baby before I put the baby's diaper on.
Perhaps that's standard childcare. I wouldn't know. My child-rearing
experience began at age two and a half so I missed the terrycloth stage. I
would suggest in any case that even if that is the way it's done, it's a bit
of an ask to expect the target audience of an indie adventure game to know
about it.
Most of the other puzzles - and there are many - can be solved by trial and error; click on everything that can be clicked on and most of them will eventually solve themselves. That's also not very engaging and it still leaves a few solutions that I doubt I'd ever have happened on by chance. Without the walkthrough I'd still be clicking and cursing.
Except of course I wouldn't because the narrative is so thin and scattered that I'd feel no compulsion to keep at it. I get what the game is trying to do as it builds up a picture of a life through fragments of a dream but there has to be a lot more of a hook than this for it to feel worth the trouble it takes to gather the pieces and fit them together.
The real problem with the demo, beyond all these specific and somewhat personal cavils that say more about my preferences than the quality of the game, is that I found it boring. If there's one emotion above all others you really don't want to evince with your demo it surely has to be boredom. On this exposure, not only won't I be wishlisting Underground Blossoms, I won't be peering any further into the rest of the Rusty Lake world either, something that, before I played the demo, I fully intended to do.
I ought to note that the demo opens with an advisory suggesting it should take about fifteen minutes to complete. It took me three times as long. Maybe, if I was the kind of player who seeks out puzzle games and knows more about the way they work, I'd have been able to speed through this one in the expected timeframe and it wouldn't have been boring at all.
I'm not and I didn't so I'll never know.
Little Kitty, Big City
Little Kitty, Big City, by contrast, was a joy to play from start to finish, even though it's also a puzzler of a sort and even further from the kind of game I normally play. The two demos are so different it seems silly to compare them but in essence they both employ the same structure: a journey in which puzzles must be solved to overcome obstacles and proceed to the next stage.
LKBC opens with what could be the CCTV evidence in a prosecution for animal cruelty. Some unmitigated idiot of a pet-owner hasn't just left the window of their high-rise apartment wide open, they've actually put a padded mat out on the ledge for their cat to sleep on. There's no guard rail and the ledge is barely as big as the cat. Go on. Guess what happens?
If you guessed the cat fell off you'd be correct, of course. If you also
guessed the cat fell to its death on the hard sidewalk below... nah, that
didn't happen. Neither did the cat display that semi-mythical ability of all
domestic felines to land on its feet and walk away unscathed, something that,
very surprisingly, does appear to have
some basis in fact.
This being a video game and a cartoonish one at that, naturally the cat bounces off various obstacles, slides down vertical surfaces by digging in its claws and most amusingly of all hitches a ride on a startled passing crow. The crow doesn't take offense and turns up not long after in the role of mentor and quest-giver.
The ride ends in a trash can because of course it does. What story about an alley cat doesn't start in a bin? Except Little Kitty is no hard-bitten, cynical, streetwise bruiser. He (Or She. Or them. Gender is neither necessary nor mentioned.) is a naive, inexperienced young housecat. All he wants to do is get back home.
Once I'd worked out how to get out of the trash (On PC, that'd be by hammering the A and D keys really fast.) I took a while to make myself comfortable with the controls. They're fairly standard: WASD to move, Space to jump, Shift to sprint, Ctrl to crouch and a mouseclick for everything else.
The only unusual one, which took me a while to get the feel of, is "Precision Jump", which requires you to hold down Space and move a pointer to get across gaps. It's somewhat fiddly and not as precise as you'd think something that actually has the word "Precision" in its name would be but I got the hang of it after a while.
As many of the comments on the Steam Community page point out, often with some exasperation, the demo has its idiosyncrasies. It's not always as easy to get to where you feel you ought to be going as it should be and the physics doesn't always feel quite right. Overall, though, I found it a pleasant and unfrustrating experience even though I'm not generally great at games that require fine movement or accurate positioning.
The demo and by implication the game turned out to be more structured than I was expecting. I thought it would be something of an open-world exploration experience, whereas it's really a sequence of discrete areas, cleverly cordoned off by impassable obstacles such as water, dogs or locked gates.
While Kitty can jump up onto cars or counters, walk along walls and fences, crawl through holes and pipes and leap across gaps, movement is still restricted. You can go where the game wants you to go and that's that. Perhaps if you collect all twenty-fives shinies for the crow and he comes good on his promise to teach you how to climb, the world might open up some more.
Oh, did I not mention that? LKBC has a ton of rpg-style gameplay. That was a surprise.
There are quests, tasks and achievements, not that any of those terms actually appear in the game. Instead, you get a To-Do list which auto-fills as you run into various NPCs (The aforementioned crow, another cat and what I thought was a racoon but which might be a red panda.) or click on stuff or enter certain areas.
The crow, for example, wants you to find twenty-five shinies, for which he'll give you a nice, fresh fish. He suggests it'll give you enough energy to get back up to your apartment. He's also willing to teach you the "inferior flying" cats call "climbing".
It might also open up some new areas to explore but if so they probably won't be in the demo. There's a very specific and quite generously expansive list of things you can do for free but once they're finished you'll have to buy the game to find out what else there is.
I didn't get that far. I caught a bird, I collected about two-thirds of the shinies, I even did some action painting.
I smashed nine out of ten of the objects needed to prove cats can be just as mindlessly destructive as people Or that's my reading, anyway. There's actually no reason given for the vandalism. I think it's just supposed to be fun to watch things break.
It kinda is, too. You can bat things about with both paws (Q and E for left and right.)to knock them off shelves or walls and you can pick
things up in your mouth and carry them, although I never found a practical use
for that one. A cat walking about with a hammer in its mouth doesn't need a context to be funny, though.
Perhaps the best part is the hats. I found four: frog, tomato, ladybird,
rabbit. There's no trick to it. No logic, either. They just pop out of spinning spheres you find hanging
in the air. Then you put them on, if you want. Or not. They don't do anything
or change anything except how you look. I'd have liked to collect more but not so much I wanted to play longer just to look for them.
It was all good fun. I had a nice time. After an hour, though, I felt I'd had about enough. There were some puzzles I hadn't solved so there were places I hadn't seen and my To-Do list was only about half done but none of it seemed to matter all that much. The whole thing felt more like a portfolio of mini-games than a constructed narrative and since I'm no kind of completionist there wasn't much of a tug to keep going.
I'm guessing that the full game must be have more of a plot, if only because getting back home is one of the items on the demo list, so that can't be the final goal. Unless they're literally giving away the entire game in the demo, presumably once Kitty knows how to get out of the apartment and back, adventures ensue.
They'll be ensuing without me, although not because I didn't have fun. I really did. I just don't feel the need for more. I think you'd need to be more of a completionist than me and like ticking off tasks on a To-Do list more than I do and maybe find cartoon cats that don't seem to have an awful lot of individual personality traits beyond being adorable more compelling company, too.
None of which is a criticism. On the contrary, I'd recommend Little Kitty, Big City to anyone that fancies a light-hearted, cartoonish cat simulator with some mild RPG overtones. As for me, I prefer my cartoon cats walking upright and wearing more than a selection of silly hats.
And solving crimes, clearing up mysteries and occasionally saving the world, too, of course..
That's what real cats do, right?
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