Excels neither at being a documentary nor a game
I saw The Cat and the Coup free on Steam and thought it could be interesting, so I downloaded it. Then today I tried it out, and to my surprise I finished it in about 15 minutes. It’s more of a very short documentary than a game, and it excels neither at being a documentary nor a game.
I was more interested in it as a game. The game element of The Cat and the Coup is very simple. You can make the cat walk left or right and make the cat jump with up or down. The spacebar makes the cat swat to knock things down or annoy people. Controlling the cat you must guide the ghost of the Iranian prime minister out of a series of rooms. Each room is a short puzzle, which isn’t very challenging considering it shows you a white cat outline where you need to paw at something. Most rooms will tilt left or right depending on where the cat walks, which is often part of the puzzle. The puzzles suffer from low challenge and the game suffers from being incredibly short.
I knew The Cat and the Coup was a documentary game, so I expected to learn something about what happened to the Iranian prime minister the game was about. Unfortunately I couldn’t follow the story very well either because it was disjointed. I’m not entirely sure if I have this correct but my understanding is that while solving puzzles you’re essentially guiding the ghost back through time, then when you solve the last (first?) puzzle time plays forward and you can read parts of the story that didn’t have a puzzle room.
