Kittens and Yarn

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Kittens and Yarn is a family-friendly Puzzle game released on PC in 2021 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022. This game is basically a hex-based tile-swapping puzzle, with players aiming to sort out the confusing spaghetti of a tangle of yarn being played with by kittens, aiming to arrange the tiles so each line of colored yarn is contiguous without any breaks.

The presentation in this game is absolutely wonderful, using adorable hand-drawn art for the background, yarn, and kittens that has some nice animation playing on the fringes while you sort out the tiles. In the meantime, the gameplay is backed by an absolutely wonderful soothing piano and light percussion theme that makes this game an even more relaxed and peaceful experience. It’s rare that music, visuals, and gameplay all work together so well in concert to strike the perfect tone in a game like this game manages to do.

And despite that tile-swapping puzzles are one of the oldest and most well-worn styles of puzzles out there, the “untangle the yarn” approach actually manages to make it something refreshing and new, making this less about recognizing or reproducing a pattern, and more about logicing out where tiles must go based on the positioning of the fixed starter tiles. This makes for a surprisingly compelling puzzle, and the game does a good job building on this as it progresses. What’s more, the controls here work just fine, whether you’re using traditional gamepad controls or a touchscreen.

Honestly, my biggest complaint about this game is that it’s so short. From what I can tell, there are only 40 or so levels here, which likely won’t take you more than an hour or two to get through. However, with a price tag of only $3, this problem is pretty easily forgiven.

Despite its unassuming theme and the fact that it’s, well, a tile-swapping Puzzle, Kittens and Yarn manages to be a truly great Puzzle game on Nintendo Switch, with a warm, inviting presentation that makes this seem like the perfect game to cuddle up with and play through a few puzzles to relax. Its short length is really its biggest flaw, but with a price of only $3 it’s hard to complain about that. If you’re a Puzzle game fan, this is absolutely a game you should add to your Nintendo Switch game collection.

tl;dr – Kittens and Yarn is a family-friendly hex-based tile-swapping Puzzle game that tasks players with rearranging hexagonal tiles to make the lines of colored yarn on the tiles match up. The surprisingly-compelling gameplay is complimented by a warm, soothing presentation. The game is short, but at $3, it’s still well worth picking up, and as such I think Puzzle game fans should consider this a must-have.

Grade: B+

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