The game is split into two "sections:" walking around in your house to craft upgrades, and flying around to forage, pick up packages, deliver packages, and enter shops. Yeah. You're on your broom for a lot of this. 99% of the game, really.
So how is the broom? ...Well, it's... eeehhhh.
The movement feels sluggish. You can tilt it in different directions to go different directions (obviously), and have buttons allocated for speeding up (which consumes energy) and slowing down. Slowing down is more like slamming the brakes completely - you come to a near-full stop very quickly; while speeding up is much much slower, consumes energy quickly, and you can barely glide after letting go of the speed up button.
You can get a bit of a speed boost by ramming into the ground and launching upwards, but this didn't always work for me (despite being the most consistent way to travel). Sometimes my character would splay out on their side (losing speed) and slide across the ground for a while before righting themselves again. I'm assuming that's a bug.
You have to lower yourself to a crawl to interact with package pickups, mailboxes, foraging, and shops. The number of times I was slapped with the "You're going too fast!" warning is agonizing. I finally get up to what feels like a good speed, and I have to slam the slow down button, and even as I barely float past the pickup I'm still going too fast? So now I have to turn around agonizingly slowly (because I lost all speed), then let go of the button and press+hold it again for a few more sections to engage "hover" mode, which lets me scoot across the ground at a snail's pace so that I can interact with things. Let me be a real mailman (mailcat?) and just toss the packages through the house window at breakneck speed!!
Foraging things feels bad, too. I wish you could just dismount your broom and go pick them up instead of scooting along the ground. In fact I wish you could just dismount your broom anywhere so you could actually interact with shops and package depots better, and with more control. You already walk around inside the house. It feels like there's no precision anywhere in the flight - my abilities to turn, control my speed, interact with things, seem largely up to luck and the terrain surrounding the villages. My hitbox feels huge and I'm constantly ramming into the ground, trees, rocks, whatever, especially when I'm trying to forage.
It became more tolerable when I turned on the "Infinite energy" in the settings. Having that button honestly saved the game from being not recommended for me, honestly. I know my struggles with the flight controls are probably a lack of my own skill and familiarity, but it is really frustrating to experience and removing the arbitrary cap from it at least let me fly around a little more consistently. And flying is your PRIMARY mode of playing the game. It is literally everything except walking around in your house for a few seconds to start a craft. I can understand wanting to make a progression system where flight feels better and better, but if I want to get better flight, I have to suffer through the lackluster controls and systems already in place.
There's nothing else I can do to really level or get money outside of flying, and the tutorial was painfully short and only explained controls - not really how the game expected you to fly or control the broom. If it just took a minute to talk about the thrust mechanics in detail and its expectations for how the player was supposed to use the flight controls, I don't think I'd struggle as much. I feel like I'm not "getting" the flight as the dev intended. Like, that there's a good flight sim in here, and I'm too stupid to figure out the proper controls to access it.
Some other nitpicks:
1. There's no way to customize decorations placed on the ground. You have to open your inventory, go to the item, select "customize", customize the color, then accept another confirmation input, and then you have to exit your inventory, press the decorate button, select the item, pick it up by holding a button (just make it a toggle press, please), and then place where you want. You can also just hover over the square you want it to be and try to then open the inventory and place it, but it just doesn't place if it doesn't fit without throwing an error or telling you what you did wrong. Also, I only seem to be able to place items on the backmost wall. I hope that's just me missing something and not that the other walls are restricted (the images on the Steam page seem to imply you can place on the other walls?)
2. Shops close at night but the game isn't very clear on their hours. I think they open at 9AM, but I have no idea when they close or if different shops have different times. Or how much their inventory varies - they seemed to have different stuff in them, but I don't know if a) the items cycle in and out b) shops actually have different item sets they pull from c) if the items will ever restock. Also, when you buy an item from a shop, the menu CLOSES and returns you to the flight controls for some reason! So you have to struggle to open the shop again! What if I wanted to buy multiple items? :(
3. THE GAME TIME DOESN'T PAUSE IN SHOP MENUS AND CRAFTING MENUS!!! Auuuugh. I don't know if there's a timer on anything in particular but the mail you get isn't very encouraging (it constantly tells you that you're a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ who can barely pass the exam and that your mentor isn't interested in you at all) and I can't figure out if I'm expected to own the house by a certain time to progress the story or if owning the house is like, the end of the game.
The game is kinda cute. The world is empty presumably to allow for flying great distances (and possibly optimization?) but that does mean it loses a lot of charm. There's not a lot of landmarks, so when navigating, you pretty much just point yourself at the indicator on the screen and struggle with the thrust across the world. It would be nice to be able to turn off the minimap bar/indicators if the world was a little more fleshed out, and try to explore it through rote memorization of the landscape, but as it is now that's not possible. Which sucks because, again, the entire game is just flying from point A to B. Well, flying from point A to desperately cranking the brakes at point B. Over. And over.
All the buildings and villages look identical. Most of the deliveries are not to villagers (who have little to say, anyways, but the thought remains). The terrain is also a little messy-looking in places. The furniture is generally nice-looking, though the colors are somewhat questionable. The game calls itself a "witchy" game but there's not much witchy about it. You cook potions on a stove(??) that increase your speed and that's it. I guess the broomstick, too, but like... you could swap the broomstick in for a pegasus or dragon and nothing would change. Why are witches mailpeople in this world? It's also a little mildly annoying that you can't name your cat. I don't like the name Onigiri, and it's not like Onigiri really has a personality or character that would meaningfully separate them as their own individual separate from the player.
So why do I recommend it?
Well, I do like it, despite its flaws. I think it's got a lot of potential and riding on the idea of a flying cat helps its case a lot. The game has options for infinite energy and money, which also soothe over some of its problems (I only used infinite energy, however). And I'm determined to learn how to fly properly in the game, despite the challenges. I really feel like it's mostly my fault that I can't fly well. And I hope the dev irons out some of the little quirks in it.
As it is I'd pay closer to like $15 rather than $20. But I'd still get it if you like cats or flying. If you like witches or decorating, it's still got aspects of those, but really it's just about flying.
