If you were wondering how the next hundred Indie Games of the Week would resume, a random explormer plucked from my Steam backlog is about as apt an indicator as any of how I intend to go on. Catmaze is very much a traditional dyed-in-the-wool explormer with a handful of major influences - Cave Story and the Castlevania Sorrow games - and a particular focus on Slavic mythology as a narrative basis. I've been using this feature to point out the latter whenever I see it; not just games that employ Eastern European folklore specifically but those from games industry "outsider" countries (Catmaze was developed in Russia) that have taken the opportunity of that status to highlight their own culture as a departure from the usual ancient Greek/Norse/Japanese represented many times elsewhere.

Explormers occupy an odd genre role in a similar case to roguelikes in that there's several signifiers that are beholden to that format (item-based progression, a non-linear map, etc.) and many developers are split between hewing as close to the model as possible for the sake of purity or taking that same type of game but add a little English (or Russian) to it in order to stand out after the genre has become, and I begrudgingly admit this as a huge fan, a little on the oversaturated side. Catmaze is absolutely of the former group: there's 2D platforming, real-time combat, a world map full of obstacles that can only be overcome with the right abilities (acquired much later, in some cases), and a slightly open aspect that still funnels you to one or two necessary locations to progress the story and find the next key - figuratively by way of a traversal-enabling upgrade, or a literal key item - to unlock further progress.

The game's story follows fledgling witch Alesta after a "spirit of sickness" called Mara carries her mother off due to it being her appointed time. Determined to get her back, Alesta embarks on a journey to discover a way to access the land of the dead, Nav, in any manner besides the easiest and most straightforward. This has her defeating and communing with various Slavic spirits, like the mushroom king Borovik or the dread Black God Chernobog, who she discovers are not quite as evil as they first appear. Likewise, she ends up meeting and helping various human NPCs in her overarching quest to find the enigmatic "Cat Bayn": a feline deity with all the knowledge in the world, with cats occupying a similar role in Slavic folklore as they do in ancient Egyptian by being some sort of earthly conduit between the worlds of the living and dead.

I spoke to its influences: Cave Story I see in the game's general aesthetic, with its correctly (if generously) proportioned protagonist and other human NPCs, and it's more expressively cartoonish non-human characters. It also has Cave Story's much disliked (by me) temporary power-up system, where the character grows progressively stronger by collecting resources dropped by defeated enemies but can lose that buff by taking too many hits. The Sorrow games, Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow, are alluded to by Catmaze's familiar system: Alesta doesn't attack foes directly but does so by equipping and summoning two types of familiar: melee and ranged. There are six of each, some of which have supporting roles rather than damaging (a melee familiar will refuse to attack, but allow you to use your magic familiars without mana cost), but must be found first along with everything else. Beyond that you have your standard HP and MP power-ups, some accessories which increase stats and can be upgraded further, a small stock of healing items and other consumables, and a system where you can gain extra temporary HP by praying at shrines and this power increases by finding runestones out in the wild. There's enough collectibles to fill the game's fairly decently sized map, and I'd estimate the whole game should take somewhere between eight to ten hours depending on how much of it you plan to see.

It does some have missteps. Most literal of which is a weird bug, possibly related to the slowdown I was getting, where certain waterbound platforms simply lose their corporeality and dunk you directly into the drink for some minor damage. It happened enough times that I'm sure it's nothing related to the controls (down+jump lets you hop down platforms) but was never a permanent issue; it just happened enough to be annoying. The game's script is decent, giving each of its characters various shades of grey with regards to their motivations and even waxing philosophical at times, but the so-so English localization has trouble keeping up with it at points, and typos abound. The main character's diary, for instance, has passages written so matter-of-factly that it occasionally made me laugh. Then there's the graphics, which as you can see in some of the screenshots can be a little inconsistent with their quality. The main character's animations and the backgrounds are generally OK, but the monsters often look like they popped out of the MS Paint nightmare dimension ready to throw down. This might be edging into the realm of entitlement, but I missed having a map that was more user-friendly: I've started taking user-placed map icons for granted in other recent explormers, though Catmaze at least has some in-game ways to locate remaining/missing power-ups close to the end of the game for those OCD 100% types who don't want to cheat and just dig up a game map on Google Image Search.

Finally, there's the more simple issue that Catmaze really doesn't do anything different or offer reasons to play it over the dozens of other explormers currently available on Steam and elsewhere, and that's made more apparent when I consider all the impressive time-travel/manipulation mechanics featured in the last two explormers I played, Timespinner and Vision Soft Reset. It isn't even the most cat-friendly explormer I can name, given Gato Roboto actually lets you control one of our furry friends. All I can really say in Catmaze's favor is that it has a real-life cultural basis for its world that's not commonly utilized in games, and that it's... just very competent at being an explormer.

Rating: 4 out of 5.