A Building Full of Cats

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

A Building Full of Cats is a Hidden Object-style Puzzle game released in 2022 on PC and Nintendo Switch, and ported to Xbox One in 2023. This game has players in the role of someone house-sitting for someone with a multi-floor building and a gazillion cats, specifically tasked with looking through the multiple rooms trying to find all of the cats hidden in the artwork and “pet” (click on) them.

The presentation here is good, with the game’s monochrome artwork still made vibrant by using nice color for the game’s 2D line art and backgrounds, with discovered cats being colored in. These visuals are backed by fairly relaxed music, which I suspect is public domain. Still, it works to create a warm, inviting mood for the game.

The gameplay here has a few clever elements that you don’t often see in hidden object games. Each room has some objects you can interact with such as drawers you can find cats within, and there are also cats that move multiple times, needing to be found after each move. It’s clear that there was some effort put into this game, despite it only being a $3 game.

Having said that, it does have some major problems. There’s a zoom button, but it only has two settings, and doesn’t allow players to zoom in close enough to easily make out some of the finer details in the artwork more clearly.

This is particularly frustrating because many of this game’s hidden cats are only just barely visible, such as the tiniest pair of ears poking out from behind something, or a tiny little cat logo on a cat food box (which apparently counts toward your total). The game does offer a hint button, but only sometimes, and this seems like a really bizarre choice, to offer players a helping hand, but making that help inconsistent.

These issues take what should have been a soothing, relaxing experience, and make it a needlessly frustrating one. And while I still think there’s some enjoyment to be found in A Building Full of Cats, it definitely feels like some poor choices were made here resulting in a game far worse than it could have been.

tl;dr – A Building Full of Cats is a Hidden Object-style Puzzle Game that has you searching line art of various rooms in a building for hidden cats. There’s some nice artwork and a few good gameplay ideas here, but the game is made far worse than it could have been due to an inadequate zoom feature and a broken hint system. It’s not terrible, but it definitely feels like it’s worse than it had to be.

Grade: C

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