• Game: Double Dagger Studio's Little Kitty, Big City
• Release Month: May
• Started: 16/12
• Completed: 16/12

Time for something low-key to squeeze between two bigger games, and what better animal is there to fit through a tight gap than a cat? Besides maybe a snake, or a mouse, or an octopus, or... well, analogies were never my thing. I was always more into similes, like that... one guy... who... OK, wow, never mind. Little Kitty, Big City is the latest in an otherwise unassociated series of 3D platformer games I've found myself playing of late, such as the recent IGotW entry The Spirit and the Mouse, where it downplays the usual flip-jumps and long leaps of the Italian plumber and his imitators and instead focuses the adventure around a creature with semi-realistic animal movement, the added advantage of which is that while the world itself might only constitute a handful of suburban streets for a small animal it might as well as be the entire Manhattan island map from a Spider-Man game in terms of relative scope. Cats are fairly acrobatic as protagonists go, and so your task here is to simply return home to your owner's penthouse apartment through a combination of eating fish for energy and using that energy to hoist yourself up climbable ivy and perform some precision pouncing to make your way upwards.

There has to be more to the game than that, of course, and while Little Kitty, Big City does allow you to make a beeline for those stamina-boosting seafood and start the treacherous trek back to your favorite spot in the sun to take a cat nap (and, I suppose, the worried human you left behind) there's a whole neighborhood to explore and a bunch of other animals—mostly other cats but also a few adventurous ducks, a helpful crow, and a chameleon that's very determined not to be seen—to talk to and from whom to pick up several other sidequests. Like other animal sims of recent times (in particular Goat Simulator and Untitled Goose Game) you're free to cause mischief among the faceless and hapless humans prowling the streets, most of whom are too glued to their phones to notice the feline figure underfoot. The game's achievement checklist is simply a combination of these sidequests and just incidental open-world mayhem, making it well suited for both the adult OCD completionist types looking to unwind and a younger audience happy to just interact with this world and see what kind of feedback they might get from messing around.

To that effect, the controls are pretty simple: A button to pounce, L-bumper to go stealth mode (good for catching birds; though as this neighborhood is a "catch and release" area they won't be a source of food), R-bumper to go "zoomies" (took me way too long to find that function), and Y to meow pathetically for some attention. You know, the standard kitty arrangement. There's an in-game map that tells you little, given it was drawn by a fellow critter, and the game is kind enough to highlight most of the collectibles on there once the story has been completed. It is, quite deliberately so, a very laid-back game that offers no conflict or enemies to face (depending on how you view the humans), a reasonably challenging main objective, and plenty else to be doing even if most of that involves destroying plant pots and tripping up people and just generally being a little shit in a cute hat (which comprise the game's main collectible set).

That's really all I can say about this one. I try to be more elaborate with these GOTY reviews since, uncommonly for me, they're for games that are recent enough to be of interest; especially to those sitting on the fence about the year's games and unsure of what they might want to catch up on as the season of spoilercasts and accolades threatens to descend upon the site, but this game is very much a case of "what you see is what you get" and keeps things simple and breezy as a matter of course. If I had complaints, it's only that it's a bit glitchy—typical of any elaborate 3D Indie game, given the large number of moving parts and small number of team members typically involved—and there could be more transparency about some of its achievement goals, especially as you're unlikely to chance upon those you earn by running around with a pair of scissors or dropping a stolen smartphone into a toilet without at least a hint. Otherwise, it's the very acme of that type of slight and unostentatious Indie game I was looking to try out this busy month between the more investment-heavy fare on my itinerary. (Rating: 4 out of 5.)

Current GOTY

1. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
2. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
3. Another Crab's Treasure
4. Pepper Grinder
5. Little Kitty, Big City
6. Botany Manor
7. Turnip Boy Robs a Bank
8. Doronko Wanko

< Back to Go! Go! GOTY! 2024

I didn't hate this game, but it ended up near the bottom of the list of games I played this year. I think it's currently at like 23 out of 24 for 2024 releases I've played, though luckily I didn't play any games I outwardly disliked this year so that still means it's like a 3/5 for me. (It's only ahead of Hellblade 2 for anyone curious).

Maybe it's not fair, they were trying to do different things with very different vibes, but in the genre of "cat simulators," I vastly preferred Stray to this one and really couldn't help but continue to compare it unfavorably to that game as I played.

@ll_exile_ll: If I'd already played Stray I might concur with feeling a little less sold on LK,BC since there seems to be far less ambition and imagination involved. This one seems a bit more earnest up front about the type of game it is, at least? Which is, to be a jerkass cat who trips people up. Stray always felt like it was trying to have its kibble and eat it too by dancing between "it's funny to make the robots fall over" and "look at this semi-serious tragic story unfolding" (granted, I haven't seen much past the intro).