Catmouth Island

[u]Recommendation[/u]: A 3D adventure game with mildly silly humor, inscrutable puzzles, and interminable travel between things you can do. [u]Critique[/u]: I feel like I make this reference a lot, but back in the early 80s, MAD Magazine ran a satirical article about video games, which described a bunch of imaginary video games that spoofed different aspects of the video gaming experience. My favorite parody was the video game called "What's Going on?" in which the character you control endlessly wanders around a black void. What's happening? What are you supposed to be doing? Is there anything out there? This game, [u]Catmouth Island[/u], is just a [i]little bit[/i] too "What's Going On?" for my taste. I spent ~40 minutes wandering aimlessly around, trying to find a point to it all. You are on an island, and there are a few scattered items with [b]huge[/b] spaces in between them on the island so that you have to run long distances to travel from one object to the next. Objects might be a person, an animal, a tree, a building, or some tool lying on the ground...and you might or might not be able to interact with the item when you get to it. If you CAN interact with the item, it's usually just brief text that appears in a pop-up, like "Hello!" (with some of the people) or "You don't need that" (with some of the tools). Every once in a while you get more information or something that you can pick up or otherwise use to perform an action. But that is very, [i]very[/i] rare. The island is divided into sections, too, so that you can run and run and run and run and finally get to the edge of a map, which then loads the map connected to that "side" of the map. The new map is much like the old one: a LOT of empty space and aimless wandering trying to find something interactive. Eventually I *did* get a quest, of sorts: I found a building that said "You can't enter here." I talked to a bunch of people, and some of them responded "Hello!" But after several minutes of random wandering, I found one person who explained that I have to get cleared as trustworthy in order to access that building. In wandering a lot more, I deduced that I have to find the book "How to Lie" and read it so that I can pass a polygraph test to thus gain entrance to the building...which is the outhouse. I bet that sounds thrilling to you, too. But the 3D animation is SO SLOW and you never know if you're headed in the correct direction or not. Where's the book? What does a book even look like? Is the book going to appear in a new area, or one of the areas I've already searched five times? The game gives you no clues or help of any kind figuring out where the book could be; it's like beachcombing for buried coins: Is this it? No. Is this it? No. Is this it? No. I guess I'll keep looking... Adventure games really do work well with static 2D screens; that's why so many of the timeless classics and the games that imitate them are set up that way. Of the few 3D adventure games that work well, the ones that work best either severely limit the size of the spaces/paths or they provide big maps and SOME assistance in navigating the wide open spaces. Neither of those things exists here. I really want to like this game. It seems quirky, and the idea that you've embarked on a quest to use the outhouse feels like it could be fun parody of the genre. But it's so, SO, incredibly slow. I feel like silly and/or parody games shouldn't take so long to make a single joke. So I'm going to uninstall it for now, and maybe return to it in a few years' time.

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1/10

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it as no cats, you monster!

Awful controls, inaccessible mouse-only gameplay and camera ruin this game. Linear progression, weird puzzles, and non-interactive environments make it unplayable.