Zodiacats

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

Zodiacats is a family-friendly Puzzle game released on PC in 2022 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game has players swapping tiles in a simple puzzle to reveal its picture, with the game’s themes mixing cartoon cats and a new-agey zodiac theme.

The presentation here is decent, but isn’t going to appeal to everyone – the cutesy characters and the framing device about a missing magical scroll that will bring peace to the world feel pretty superfluous to the game and its gameplay, and it’s a bit odd that the puzzles themselves are all simple drawings in sepia tone when the rest of the presentation is more colorful. At the very least, the game’s placid, dreamy soundtrack is pretty nice, albeit not really memorable.

As for the gameplay itself… this is a simple tile-swapping Puzzle. There’s no timer, no score, and not much of a challenge. As such, there’s not really much for me to say about the gameplay that doesn’t tie into the presentation – namely, the sepia tone puzzles can make it ambiguous at times which piece goes where.

Solving puzzles will give you the most simple and banal bits of info about zodiac signs and cats, and there’s even a game mode that will have you input your zodiac sign to tell you what type of cat you should get. Yeah, you really have to be into both cats and zodiac stuff to really “get” this game, I guess.

I feel like Zodiacats is a game that places its focus on the wrong area. Why make the rest of the presentation so colorful if the puzzles themselves are so bland? Why bother with making a pointless story framing device if the gameplay is so simple and disposable? In the end, I suspect that some will still like this game, but in my opinion it does little to distinguish itself within the genre.

tl;dr – Zodiacats is a family-friendly tile-swapping puzzle game with cartoony cats and a focus on zodiac signs. Unfortunately, the gameplay is bland and unoriginal, and while the presentation is decent, the puzzles themselves are sepia-tone and not much to look at. Unless you absolutely love both cats and zodiac stuff, and don’t mind playing the most basic and simple sort of puzzles, skip this game.

Grade: C-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}