Cat Meoir: Feline Detective

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PRO: As of this time (5/2024), it was free. Short. Good voice acting and cute drawings in the cut scenes. CONS: Nothing is intuitive about the game play. Janky controls. Can cause motion sickness. Actual game play is block graphics.

I did it. I beat the game. Only true gamers can 100% this metaphoric labyrinth of the inner workings of the societal construct of 1960s non-descript city through the eyes of a feline that definitely has rabies and did NOT kill his owner. Yes, I am better than you. You have no idea what I put in and how little I got out. The hours the amount of times it would be the birds outside waking to tell me to sleep. The real mystery was the friends we made on the way.

It has really nice introduction into the game by telling what happened and what you will have to do thanks to the comic and dub but everything after it is awful. The abysmal camera which will cause you motion sickness, bad controls and almost non existent clues that should allow you to go further in the story and no Idea of where you should go and do.

The game is very promising and has a really neat idea. However, a few of the mechanics could use some work and the graphics need to be played on low otherwise you wont be able to see at all.

Really clunky and unpolished controls. Difficult to move. The camera is too sensitive while also not enough. But the art is pretty and the voice-acting is good.

Another review described the camera as sliding around like butter in a hot pan and that user was entirely correct. I like high sensitivity in video games, but this was terrible to control, especially in the tight spaces you need to be in to progress the game. Speaking of, the progression of this game was not intuitive in any way. There are no visible objectives, so it's a walking around and getting lost simulator until the dog gets you or you happen upon what you're looking for by pure chance (yes I did remember that there was a map at the end, so either I missed a hint about the map or it was never made clear). There's a tutorial NPC in some alleyway that you wouldn't know about unless you just ran into her by pure happenstance. Her tips are mildly helpful for the police station part, and I was lucky to find her before that, but it still doesn't even describe that you need to take pictures of conversations rather than just experiencing them. Once I figured that out, it was back to getting lost simulator until I remembered that there are descriptions on the clues themselves. These descriptions didn't always have the necessary information though, and forced me to rewatch the cutscenes instead of just having a summary of what I needed to know. Spoilers for end [spoiler] The chase sequence was hard to navigate even with the bright red arrows, but that's because at some point I managed to get turned around and go backwards at least 2-3 times. I don't know if this was intended or skill issue but it just stressed me out :([/spoiler] The art was cute and I can see the vision, but DAMN please do something about the camera and the objectives system if you want to make it better.

Im tired

"Cat Meoir: Feline Detective" is a somewhat genuine looking open world detective adventure game with a cat theme, some low poly graphics, and one of the worst control schemes ever to inflict itself on gaming. I'm one of those guys that believes software should be tested before being published, but it's pretty obvious here the developers never actually tried playing this before they threw $100 at Steam Direct. The idea is that you're a writer (must have been a pretty bad one) that gets killed and reincarnated as a cat. Solve your own murder mystery by running around and doing cat stuff to piece together all the clues. The game would even be viable if the controls weren't so bad. In terms of visuals, this features fairly low quality low poly 3D visuals which will deter a lot of gamers, understandably. Gaming is a visual medium, and while some developers struggle with creating high quality visuals, failing to do so is a disservice to gamers. It's very difficult to recommend bad looking games. Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 4 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? Not this time. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough.