Since it's supposed to be a family-friendly game, I figured it would be one of the quickest and easiest to play and I was not wrong. The demo took me fifteen minutes, end to end.
Adventures of a Cat in Space.
I originally picked this one for three rather obvious reasons:
- There's a cat.
- There's space.
- There's Adventure.
The main reason I picked it, though, was because of what it looks like.
To be honest, that was why I picked pretty much all of them, this time. I was on my laptop in bed and I didn't want to get into a lot of research so I just sorted the list by a few keywords and genres - RPG, MMO, Adventure, Point&Click, Visual Novel - and then chose the ones that either had names or screenshots I liked the look of.
Shallow, I know, but you have to get it done somehow.
This one scored highly on both title and image but it also came with another, often-overlooked, advantage - associations with things I already know I like. Almost certainly unintentional and irrelevant associations but that's not going to stop the neurons firing. Marketing departments try to make things like that happen all the time but in this case I suspect any connections were being made in my mind only.
Seeing the name immediately reminded me of two TV shows I like - or rather one show and one segment: Dogs in Space and Pigs in Space (From The Muppet Show, of course.) The visuals, as I watched the video linked in yesterday's post, evoked happy memories of Bob Godfrey cartoons, specifically Roobarb.
While the game does have Godfrey's trademark shimmering (Known in the animation trade as "boiling".), the stylistic similarity doesn't go much further than that and there seems to be no allusion whatsoever to either of the previously-mentioned animal-in-space shows. Nevertheless, in my head, as Elastica always liked to say, somehow a vital connection was made.
And I'm happy it was. Adventures of a Cat in Space (The Demo) is a fun fifteen minutes.
The plot involves the attempts of a cat to get back home after chasing a mouse into a spaceship, accidentally launching it and ending up drifting in deep space. The pictures are pretty to look at, the puzzles are easy to figure out and the titular cat makes for a characterful protagonist.
I don't much see the point of describing anything that happens in any more detail than that. It's fifteen minutes. If you want to know more you may as well go see for yourself.
The one very odd thing about the game is the music. I can't recall the last time I played a kid-friendly game of this sort that also came with an original indie-rock soundtrack. Music is, in fact,a core part of the game, described on the website as "a musical adventure". The full game will include a number of songs which, if they're all like the couple in the demo, should be a fun time for all.
The game is a bit of an arts and music fest all round. It's a collaboration between games designers Tall Story Games and "musical theatre specialists" Little Seeds and it's sponsored by Arts Council England.
It also features voice acting by Arthur Darvill, a name the very Brit-focused devs imagine will be best known for playing Rory, one of Dr. Who's many companions, but which may well be more familiar to an international audience as Rip Hunter from the Arrowverse show Legends of Tomorrow.
As well as being a successful actor on television, Darvill is also an accomplished musical theater player, having won an Olivier Award for "Best Actor in a Musical". He plays the somewhat annoying computer in the spaceship and also sings the title song, on which evidence I'd guess he's long cherished fantasies of being the lead singer in the kind of band likely to appear at DIY Popfests around the world.
They'd love him in Japan, I bet. And Madrid.
Whether he sings all the songs in the game I don't know. Nor do I know whether every song is rendered in the same musical style. I really hope so, though. That would be reason enough to play it, even if the game itself wasn't as much fun as, by the look of the demo, it's going to be.
I thought for a while about whether to wishlist this one. I enjoyed my fifteen minutes with it a lot but if I'm realistic, the chances of my actually buying it and playing it are slim. My wishlist is stuffed with games I added after playing the demos and then found, when the time came, that I'd probably already seen as much of as I wanted. A good demo does run the risk of sating demand, or it does for me, anyway.
Still, if Stars Reach has taught me anything, it's that there's value in wishlisting games on Steam, even if you never intend to buy them. Value to the developers, that is. And since it costs me nothing...
Wishlisted. And recommended.
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