Cattails | Become a Cat! Review

There aren’t many games out there that entice you with the chance to play as a cat in an open world type of environment, however Chris Chung shows us what a unique experience like this can be like. Cattails is an open world, survival game where you play as a feral cat who tries to survive the tough life of a cat who has been left behind.

Few games start out as depressingly as Cattails. You are a cat who was playing with their happy human child when suddenly the child’s mother decides to do the only logical thing when upset with her child, she drives out to an empty road and abandons you to the wilderness. Not many two-dimensional games can make me feel the way I felt after this opening cutscene of sadness, luckily the game picks up emotionally when you are found by a fellow cat.

Upon entering the game you receive a friendly greeting from a cat who tells you that there is a community of abandoned cats that you can join up with and be a part of a new family. The leader of this group of cats teaches you the basics of hunting and while this seems simple and straightforward at first, the hunting mechanics actually have far more depth to them than meets the eye. Early on it seems like the only thing you have to do is sneak up behind wildlife and hit the pounce button, however your positioning, the timing you choose to pounce and the direction your prey is facing all have a direct impact on your success rate.

Just like the hunting mechanic Cattails has a wide variety of RPG style mechanics, gathering plants, hunting, exploring a surprisingly vast world, hidden treasure, cat fights, and even dungeons. All of this slowly unravels piece by piece. There is so much to do in this vast world and sometimes it's hard to believe that you are playing as a cat and yet you literally get to socialize as one and even start your own colony upon completing the main questline. While there is a lot to do in Cattails, there is a point where things will start to feel repetitive as it is a survival game after all. You will spend a lot of time hunting wild animals just to stop yourself from starving, the combat with other cats doesn’t have a lot of depth so fighting will start to feel monotonous at times.

One thing that seems to help with breaking up the monotony of fighting a bunch of other cats with basic combat is using the experience you gain to choose new skill points/abilities. For example, sleeping will reward you experience based on how many people have walked by your den while passed out. You can use this experience to level up and gain new skill points that can be spent on abilities like teleport home, mortally wound an opponent, and you can even get a skill to help heal your fellow felines!

Despite the repetitiveness, Cattails does provide a lot of different things to do especially considering you are playing a survival sim where you play a cat. Throughout the game I was able to improve relationships with other cats by bringing them gifts, hunt a variety of critters to sustain me while exploring the surprisingly large world, and I was even able to court a female cat and eventually had kittens. While this may sound a bit strange at first, the depth of this game is genuinely surprising for what it is, and it's one of those games that you can just pick up a play for an hour and put it down again and you will never feel lost. Cattails is a great game that does a fairly good job of putting you in the “paws” of a lost feline who must battle their way to the top of the cat chain. Despite the repetitive moments there is quite a bit to do in this game and it definitely feels like it was actually made for the Switch, not just ported to it.