Thousands of retro 2D platformers are infesting Steam, and "Neon Cat Tickler" is just more pollution in a crowded market of terrible games. There are over 17,000 platformers on Steam, literally thousands (you can go see for yourself if you search for the platformer tag on the store, I'm not kidding). And this is far from being one of the best of those.
This platformer is a solid contender for one of the worst games on Steam... the developer didn't even bother animating the 2D neon "cat" sprite you control. It's just a static sprite.
The gameplay and level design are on par with this level of sheer laziness... the game relies on a simple gimmick where platforms phase in and out so you need to move quickly and use timing to hit the right platforms at the right time or you fall through and die. Coupled with the incredibly awful level design and they eye hurtingly bad visuals, and if you try to play this, you'll think about giving up video games completely.
Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game features extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2026 (and this was released not so far back in 2019), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
Those technical issues put this game beneath what is expected from a contemporary, professionally developed PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was [b]only 2 players[/b]. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Let's look at the price and what kind of value this actually offers gamers. Should you buy this game? Is it one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam?
Neon Cat Tickler is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. There's enough defects and quality problems with this game that it's really impossible to recommend to gamers.
[b]Note:[/b] Due to the very poor quality of the game, all the comedians came out of the woodwork. The vast majority of the reviews for this game are joke reviews, such as "this game cured my cancer, saved my marriage, changed my life" etc. Because most of the reviews are as insincere/mocking the game, and if you removed the fake/joke reviews the game would have a markedly different review score, the positive review score for this game should be disregarded.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
