Hidden Cat Outlaws

Fun little hidden object game, very cute with a nice hand drawn art style.

There are 15 stages that all follow the same basic idea, since each one takes place in a Wild West town. The layouts of the buildings, along with some of the surrounding scenery and environmental details, are shuffled around enough that every stage still feels a little different. I also liked that the locations are not just static images. People walk around and smoke rises from fires, but these elements repeat across scenes. In every stage, which you can pan around and zoom in or out slightly, your goal is to find all the cats. The total number is displayed on screen. Most cats are simply lying around, while others are hidden inside locked buildings. These are marked with a lock, and to open them you first need to find and click on a key hidden somewhere in the stage. A stage can contain several locked buildings, and each one requires its own key. Once you open a building, you are taken to a small indoor scene where you need to find one or two additional cats to complete the stage. Because the keys are so small, I often found them harder to spot than the cats themselves. Indoor scenes repeat because there are the same buildings in every scene, such as a barn, store, bank, and so on. Besides the cats, every stage also hides three collectible objects that are shown only as silhouettes next to the cat counter. They have distinctive enough shapes that they are usually easy to recognize, although they start repeating across later stages. They're also completely optional, so you don't need to find them to finish a stage. The final hidden collectible is a treasure, which can only be found with the help of a treasure map you receive after defeating a boss cat. The boss cat also counts toward the total number of cats and is found inside a special building marked with its own unique icon. The gunfight mini game is very simple. You just click on targets as they flash in a random order, and every successful hit drains the boss's health. There is no way to fail. After winning, the treasure map reveals a small section of the stage with a marked location. Once you figure out where it is and click on the right spot, you uncover a unique treasure that unlocks a special achievement. Some cats can be surprisingly tricky to spot, even when they're sitting out in the open. Thankfully, there's a helpful hint system that points you toward the location of a missing cat. It also recharges quickly, making it easy to finish a stage in just a few minutes.