Hex Cats

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Hex Cats is a family-friendly Puzzle game released on PC in 2023 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2024. This game has players rotating hex tiles, 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 decent, using hand-drawn art for the background, yarn, and kittens that has some animation playing on the fringes while you sort out the tiles. These visuals are backed by a playful piano theme that works well enough for the game, but gets repetitive before too long.

Honestly, it’s hard to play this game without thinking of Kittens and Yarn, and the comparison doesn’t look great for Hex Cats. Both games feature slightly different gameplay – Kittens and Yarn has you swapping tiles while Hex Cats has you rotating them. However, otherwise it’s hard not to notice the similarities in theme, gameplay, even the $3 price tag for both games.

In all areas save for the price, Hex Cats is the inferior game. The gamepad controls are clunkier (though the touchscreen works okay), the music and visuals are far less charming, and even the menus in Hex Cats have the stink of mobile menu design. And then there’s the fact that Hex Cats is 2 years late to the party, making it feel very much like a knockoff of the former game being sold at the same price.

As much as I’m criticizing Hex Cats, it’s not a bad game, and fans of relaxed Puzzle games will likely find it to be enjoyable. The issue if that for the exact same price they can get a better game with a better presentation and better controls. If you already have Kittens and Yarn and want another game in the same style, Hex Cats may be a decent follow-up. But if you don’t have Kittens and Yarn, that’s the Puzzle game to go for.

tl;dr – Hex Cats is a family-friendly hex-based tile-spinning Puzzle game that tasks players with rearranging hexagonal tiles to make the lines of colored yarn on the tiles match up. This is a perfectly decent Puzzle game that has the unfortunate problem of looking like a second-rate copycat of Kittens and Yarn, a game with similar theming and gameplay, and that is all-around better. If you don’t have that game, get that instead. If you do, this may suffice as a decent follow-up game in a similar style.

Grade: C+

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