Cats and Seek : Kyoto

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Silesia Games)

Cats and Seek: Kyoto is a family-friendly “hidden object”-style Puzzle Game released on PC in 2024 and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2025. This is the third game in the Cats and Seek series, and it adds a new photo mode and coloring mode, as well as the change in location to Kyoto for your search for hidden cats, puzzle pieces, and other things.

The artwork here is simple cartoony 2D line art with plenty of detail, and users can customize the colors how they want, so if you prefer blue lines with found items being pink and a background being green… well, I suppose you can. These visuals are backed by one of four bouncy but forgettable synthesized themes, as well as plenty of cat meows.

I think the gameplay here fares better than many of these “hidden object”-style games – there’s plenty to find here, with each scene hiding well over a hundred objects to seek out. There’s a hint system with a timer that only gives you the general area a hidden item is in but not its exact location, which is a pretty good balance of helpful without giving things away. And this game doesn’t do that annoying thing where you have to interact with the scenery to uncover some hidden objects without knowing what you can interact with – there are treasure chests to unlock, but you need to find keys first, that’s it. Plus, both the gamepad controls and touchscreen controls in handheld mode work quite well.

Okay, so what complaints do I have here? Well, first of all, while some hidden objects are straightforward (cats, puzzle pieces, keys), others aren’t (random characters that the game deems noteworthy enough to be “findable”). Also, finding a cat will give you a small bio, but this bio doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the cat you just found and it disappears too quickly to read, though you can click the cat again to bring it back briefly.

However, probably the biggest problem here is going to be game length. While each location in the game has numerous hidden objects to find, there are only two locations here. This is mitigated somewhat by the game’s low $3 price tag, but that’s still disappointing for a game that is otherwise one of the better Hidden Object-style games.

Still, if you don’t mind a bite-size Hidden Object game that you’ll easily finish within an hour or two tops that only costs a few bucks, Cats and Seek: Kyoto is a decent entry in the genre. It doesn’t do anything especially revolutionary or original, but what it does it does mostly pretty well, at least while it lasts.

tl;dr – Cats and Seek: Kyoto is a family-friendly hidden object-style Puzzle game where players try to uncover various hidden cats, puzzle pieces, and other things in a pair of cartoony Kyoto-based scenes. The gameplay here is one of the better Hidden Object games, but there’s nothing truly extraordinary here, and the game is extremely short. Still, for only a few bucks, this may be worth a look for fans of the genre.

Grade: C+

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

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