Cat From Hell – Cat Simulator

Genre: First-Person Stealth

Players: 1

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Review:

Cat From Hell, released in 2025 on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, is a First-Person Stealth game where players take the role of an orange cat in the household of an elderly woman who has just received a new black cat after it fell from Santa’s sleigh. After the black cat knocks over a plant and makes it look like the orange cat did it, the orange cat gets a plan – wreck the entire household and pin the blame on the black cat.

The presentation here seems pretty good at first. The game has a colorful, slightly-cartoony look with 3D character designs that seem reminiscent of the works of Pixar (the old lady herself looks like the one from the intro to the film Ratatouille). The characters are fairly expressive, and the house is full of interesting stuff to make it look somewhat lived-in. This is all backed by whimsical music, with some holiday music on the title screen.

Unfortunately, the quality presentation is only skin-deep, and is soon ruined by stiff animation, tons of clipping, and bizarre object physics, which lends to an overall feeling that this game was polished just enough to look good in screenshots.

The core concept of this game is a good one – wreck the house without getting caught doing it, presumably while making it look like the black cat was the culprit, with the goal of doing enough damage that granny gets furious and boots the new cat out of the house. Unfortunately, while this concept might be great, the execution is terrible.

First, while the black cat hisses at you when you draw near, it is otherwise a non-entity here. It doesn’t matter whether or not you damage the house near the black cat, the black cat will still take the blame for it.

Second, the old lady walks very slowly, making it pretty easy to mess things up in a section of the house before she gets there. She’s not very smart, either – even if she sees you running from the scene of the crime, she won’t put two and two together.

Third, the old lady’s ineptitude is probably necessary, because the game doesn’t give players many options for hiding or escaping. Despite being two stories, the house is fairly small – there’s a TV room and going out from that there’s a entryway and bathroom, a kitchen, stairs leading to an upstairs landing and upstairs bedroom, and that’s it. And the only hiding spots are cardboard boxes in the TV room and kitchen… but you’ll learn soon enough that you don’t really need them.

Fourth, both the old lady and the black cat have pretty terrible pathfinding, and each got stuck in a wall at some point.

Fifth, the game doesn’t point out what objects you can interact with until you get right up next to them. There is a button you can press to be directed to one object remaining that you can still mess with, but this button stopped working well before I reached the game’s end.

Sixth, not all objects seem to actually matter to the gameplay, and the game doesn’t make it clear which do and which don’t. The old lady cares about pillows being ripped and vases being knocked down, but doesn’t seem to care at all about objects being thrown around. At one point, I threw a butcher knife at the black cat right in front of her, and it bounced off and hit her, and not only did it not do anything, but neither she nor the black cat seemed to care.

Seventh, Objects that you would expect to be interactable aren’t. The Christmas tree loaded with presents underneath and with ornaments dangling from it? Completely static, with no ability to interact. The arms of couches and chairs? You won’t be scratching them. Virtually everything in the bathroom? Non-interactive.

Eighth, there’s zero variety here. No room for creativity or anything like that. Everything boils down to either grabbing it and throwing it, or just pressing a button and it’s instantly wrecked.

Ninth, at regular intervals, there will be a cutscene with the old woman scolding the black cat (with unintelligible voiced murmuring). This cutscene is the same every time, and after the first time every subsequent time does nothing but wreck the game’s pacing.

Tenth, this game can be completed within twenty minutes or so. Even for a game priced at $5, that’s pretty pathetic.

So many issues, and it’s a shame since the concept is good and on a surface layer the presentation seems nice. But sadly, Cat From Hell is just an empty, cynical, meaningless experience that has no intention of trying to make full use of that concept. It’s extremely short yet you’ll grow bored and frustrated with it well before it ends. I recommend you just skip it altogether.

tl;dr – Cat From Hell is a First-Person Stealth game that has players taking the role of a cat trying to wreck its owner’s house and blame it on the other cat. It’s a great concept, and the presentation seems nice at first too, but once you get past that first impression, you’ll find this is a short, empty experience that absolutely fails to capitalize on that good first impression.

Grade: D

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