I can't begin to imagine what reasons I might have for gravitating towards a lot of lighter stuff for this feature over the past few weeks, but I'm discovering there's less I'm able to tolerate from the more mentally-taxing fare available. There's a number of games I struck from my immediate Indie backlog after a few minutes of gameplay because I either wasn't feeling it or they took one look at this agéd-ass laptop and stated, quite plainly, "well, this simply isn't acceptable to me, a modern video game." And so it's come to this: Where's Waldo But For Cats.

Hidden Paws is a delightful but wafer-thin hidden objects game in the purest sense - no fancy HOPA-style adventure game puzzling here, no sir - with one significant advantage it has over peers like Hidden Folks or The Tiny Bang Story: each environment is fully 3D, and the player's roaming camera possesses free-form movement that allows them to check every nook and cranny at every angle for wayward felines. The goal of each map is to find a certain number of cats (essential) and balls of yarn (inessential). Finding about half the cats is enough to unlock the next "island" - each stage being a few rocks in an endless white ocean - though you can stick around and look for the rest if you'd like. The game has a generous hint system that gives you the closest non-cat object to one of your missing targets, which may well be the box or car trunk it's hiding in, and there's no time limit or other restrictions to worry about. Cats will also meow when you're close by, so it's not too difficult to narrow down where they might be hiding if you're in the right general area. Overall, it's very deliberately designed to be enjoyed by the casual crowd and/or the very young, though for the latter they might need some practice with the mouse controls: the camera uses all three buttons (left+drag moves the camera, right+drag changes where the camera looks, and the mouse-wheel zooms in and out) in a semi-intuitive but occasionally over-corrective fashion. Even with these concessions though, finding that last cat can sometimes take a while on my third sweep of the island my mental landscape is already beginning to devolve into something like this.

So the game controls well enough and it has a cute concept. I'd also argue that looks and sounds fairly charming too; the former has a sort of low-poly style that works in part due to the effective use of lighting as well as how rarely you really need to zoom-in close to these environments given the distinctive appearances of the cats and yarnballs, and the latter involves some gentle orchestral muzak that is commonly applied to contemplative puzzle games like this. However, it should be said that even with only sixteen levels the game soon starts repeating itself. This is due to the game's lack of discrete 3D assets to build its island habitats around, which I imagine was a major cost consideration during production. You'll be opening chalet windows, car trunks, boxes and crates, and picking through piles of firewood on almost every island, most of the time with nothing to show for it as the developers have already started looking for alternative methods to stump you. There's also almost nothing in the way of the little incidental jokes that Hidden Folks inserted into all its scenes (which, of course, were inspired by the many goofs in the impressive crowds of the original Where's Waldo books). It maybe didn't need to go overboard given that the objective was a serene and wholesome little game about finding lonely cats lost in the snow, but the lack of variance was striking about a dozen islands in.

Developers Manic Hyena seem to be very attached to the concept of hunting (in a nice way) cats across various little 3D diaramas. Since the release of Hidden Paws in early 2018, they've produced two more: Hidden Paws Mystery, which looks to take the player closer to the ground to search for kitties on-foot, and the newly released Summer Paws, which... well, it's the same thing as Hidden Paws, but set in the warmer months. More respect to them if they plan to keep iterating on the concept: it's evident from the first Hidden Paws that while the core makes for a solid casual experience, there's room to grow with more ideas and diversity to keep their audience of ailurophiles guessing. Can't say I didn't enjoy a laid-back time with it, even with these limitations.

Rating: 3 out of 5.