A Castle Full of Cats

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

A Castle Full of Cats is a Hidden Object-style Puzzle game released in 2023 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. A direct follow-up to the prior year’s A Building Full of Cats, this game has players in the role of a brave cat trying to undo a curse put on a horde of cats in and around a castle transforming them into various spooky creatures, which you do by… finding them and clicking on them. Hey, it is a Hidden Object game, after all.

Much as with the previous game, 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 lighthearted “spooky” music to fit the game’s Halloween-esque theme. It works, though it doesn’t have the same nice relaxed tone as the previous game.

As with the previous game, 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. There have also been some improvements made here over the prior game – players have much more control over the zoom function, and the hidden cats are no longer hidden in ways that leaves only a tiny portion of them poking out – aside from those hidden in objects you need to interact with, all cats here are in plain view.

That’s not to say there aren’t problems here. The hint system, while more clear than in the prior game, is still inexplicably stingy for a game seemingly designed for casual audiences, only giving out hints when you find and click on rare crystal balls occasionally found in the game’s levels.

However, the real problem here is that in making the cats look like various monstrous creatures (sometimes with catlike features), it makes it far less clear what actually is a cat in this game. Sometimes a cat will look like a normal cat, sometimes it’ll look like a ghostly cat or a bat with cat ears… and sometimes, it will look like some other creature that has little in common with cats. Which would be fine, I guess, except the game also has creatures within it that aren’t cats. As a result, you’ll be clicking on things to see if the game considers them a cat or not, leading to some degree of trial and error.

It’s frustrating to see A Castle Full of Cats genuinely try to address the problems of its predecessor, only to introduce completely different problems in this game. While it’s not a terrible Hidden Object-style Puzzle game, the change in theme makes the presentation somewhat less “cozy” than the prior game, and also makes finding all of the game’s “cats” more of an exercise in trial and error. Some players may enjoy this, but overall it’s far from a great entry in its genre.

tl;dr – A Castle Full of Cats is a Hidden Object-style Puzzle Game that has you searching line art of various rooms in a castle for cats that have been cursed to turn into other creatures. There’s some nice artwork and a few good gameplay ideas here, but the theming definitely feels less enticing than the previous game, and the choice to have players search for cats that aren’t quite cats leads to a lot of frustrating trial and error. It’s not a terrible Hidden Object game, but it’s far from a great one.

Grade: C

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