30.1 hours played
Written 7 years ago
I shall express my enjoyment of this game by inexplicably running up and down the stairs a few times.
Like all these "Choice of Games games", whether you will enjoy it depends upon being interested in the subject matter and writing style of the author (as well as a general willingness to play these sorts of games). Making use of the demo is always recommended, and covers a decent amount of gameplay, but since this one is so large and long, it's actually a relatively smaller percentage of the game than some other CoG games.
In this case, the subject matter is obviously just being a mundane cat in a British couple made up of a teacher that wants to be a rock star in spite of a total lack of talent, and a Member of Parliament from a small animal-rights party. The writing style, meanwhile, is basically every cat-centric story, where the cat talks about themselves as though they are an evil genius, even when they're tricked into thinking a piece of string is attacking them.
You have a pretty wide range of latitude for what you're allowed to do, compared to most CoG games. Much of it involves which family members you snuggle up to and push towards your ends, creating whole chunks of story you won't see, depending on who you're with at the time.
So far as game elements go, it can be fairly confusing in some places. There are a ton of stats, and it's not really obvious which one will be used when you try to do things. I find myself failing skill checks frequently just because I didn't realize it would check a skill or made the wrong assumption about which would be checked. Fun-Loving is (maybe?) the one that I fail the most, which is your "make a big mess and cause distractions" stat. Demanding is the stat you need to raise to yowl really well along to music. Sometimes, I'm not even sure if I failed at a stat at all, or if it's impossible to succeed no matter what. This would be hugely frustrating in some of the more "formal" and "RPG-like" CoG games, but fortunately, there seems to be little price for failure in most cases, so long as you understand what stat will unlock the general chunk of story you want. (I.E. if you want to yowl to music and get on YouTube like the screenshots show, you need lots of Demanding, and to get friendly with Andre.)
There's also some oddball elements to the story, such as your character narrating about how cats have legends about the old days from decades before, but whenever you encounter other cats, thay have no actual means of communication besides body language. (They must be excellent charades players!)
Basically, it's a story where you play a cat who tries to "encourage" different behaviors, such as "encouraging a politician to tear into her opponents" by demonstrating attacks on the bath mat, or "encouraging them to keep feline suffering in mind" by knocking over hot coffee on yourself. If that sounds funny, buy this game. If that sounds like the same tired cat memes you're sick of, keep moving on.