0.7 hours played
Written 23 days ago
Having played way too many hidden cat games, I can confidently say that Ever Seen a Cat is above average within the space and it deserves some praise.
It operates like many other games like it, but it has some nice touches. The first one I noticed was the menu, it has a lot of customization and that is appreciated. However, I would like to note that an option to change my cursor back to a normal Windows cursor would be appreciated, the paw cursor is cute, but it feels odd to use to my autistic brain. What I noticed next and felt enhanced the game the most was how cats are hidden. In many games like this, the cats are blended in only slightly often just using shapes to distinguish them and often this is done by keeping images as simple line art and maybe coloring them at the end. In this game though the art is done in a way that heavily blends the cats into different parts of the environment. This not only makes it feel fresh in a market that is very samey but also creates harder-to-find cats. Many hidden object games are too easy and it was a pleasant surprise to see that this game was more difficult than many others. When hiding cats though one complaint I have is that there are a notable number of times when cats would be in the top corners, this is problematic as they can be hidden by the UI. Of note, you can fully zoom out to eliminate this issue but the game is more comfortable close up so it just shouldn’t be a thing here. Beyond that, I was torn for some time on the speedrun/timer aspect of this game. It feels a bit artificial to say that your game has replayability because it can be timed, but here it works for several reasons. First of all, there are many scenes with a more limited number of cats than many other hidden cat games have, so you rush through them really quickly and then can move to the next, you can do this in a loop and it feels pretty good honestly. Second, the cats are semi-randomized, which means that you can have different layouts a lot of the time. This means that the search goes beyond raw memorization, which is nice. I do think that there is something to be said about predictability and how it can be good for speedrunning, but some in the speedrunning category enjoy a bit of that randomness (look at Minecraft speedruns for example). Finally, though at first, I was annoyed that I had to play back through the game multiple times in order to get all the achievements I realized that it did something to me psychologically that helped encourage that desire for speed. By making me go through multiple times it promoted fast runs because of their efficiency, which encouraged me to try caring for the fun of it, and that is exactly what happened. This also means that you see your time and how you did multiple times which encourages comparisons that help you care about your times. This all combines to make the speedrun/timer aspect of the game feel good. My only other minor note is that I wish that the hint system did not just outright reveal the cats, but instead just gave you the general area of where they are, it always feels more satisfying to have hints, not answers. Overall, this game is definitely above average for hidden object cat games.
The sound design was also pretty pleasant. Many other games like this have 1 or maybe 2 songs, here though they have somewhere between 4-6, and they are all pretty decent. They are just vibe tracks that rely more on instruments like the piano and guitar, and though none of them stood out too much they felt very fitting. The only other sound design is the limited click sound effects, a few meows, and the purr you get when using the hint option all of which are good. I appreciate that every found cat was not a meow, but a variable pitch ding. It sounded satisfying and kept the noise from being annoying when selecting cats in quick succession in my opinion. Overall, this game is a cut above most in its sound design.
I alluded to this a bit earlier in the gameplay section, but the art of this game is impressive mechanically for a game like this. It has a lot of creativity and variety with cats having all sorts of different textures, shapes, and charming characteristics while all still being very clear. None of the cats feel like they are unfairly hidden despite the obfuscation they have from their unique design. The art around the cats is just as impressive using many slightly different styles/environments to hide them. One thing that is brilliantly done within the backgrounds is that it has a lot of things that are similar in look to the cats, but clearly aren’t on full inspection. It is just brilliant; the art is easily the strongest part of this game.
Overall, I like this game. And I played the second one as well and have the same opinion just in case you were curious. I will be copying large portions of this review for that one and making a few changes to adjust some of my thoughts. Of note: at full price I could see some hesitation in picking up this game, many others in the space are $1 as opposed to this game’s $2 price tag. However, on sale it can go down as low as 60 cents USD which is about where all of the other games get priced at on sale anyways so this one is an easy sell in my opinion (even at full price in my opinion). But yeah, have you ever seen a cat? Either way, this is a great way to see more.
