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A Building Full of Cats: up on the roof

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I like cats. I like Little Kitty Big City, I like Pix the Cat, I even liked Blinx. If I like games with a few cats in, then I am almost certain to love games with hundreds of cats in, right?

In this case, yes. A Building Full of Cats is a hidden object game where the objects are cats. Lots of cats. Each floor of the building has fifty cats in plain sight, and some (I think ten) hidden in cupboards, behind curtains, and so on. There are two rooms per floor, including a bathroom, meaning that you can’t see everything at once, and there’s one cat who moves when you click on them, until you find their final hiding place. When you start a level, there are a great many cats who are easily visible, but by the time you get to the last few you’re searching for a couple of ears sticking out of a vase or similar.

The monochrome art style makes the cats pop out once you click on them.

I’ve completed floors 1 and 2, and also the roof off the top of floor 5. I find it a very relaxing game, so am saving other floors when I need to destress.

I’ve actually played and completed another game by the same people, Hidden Cats in London. I mainly started that because I needed the trophies for one of the TrueTrophies events a while ago, but it was just as charming as A Building Full. I see there are others set in Paris and other cities, so I may need to investigate those in future.

Explorers (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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A little Pico-8 game which I picked up from itch a while back, Explorers has you boating about a randomly generated archipelago, finding treasure, meeting other people who you can try to convince to trade with you or help you, and sometimes stealing their boats.

The aim is to complete your map, which you can do by visiting everywhere, but you can also fill it in more quickly by asking the people you meet about where they’re from or have been and they’ll draw some of it for you.

It isn’t particularly complicated, but it’s an incredible example of what you can do with Pico-8!

Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Toils (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Obviously the reason I started playing this is because of the absurd name. How I came to own it in the first place, however, is a mystery. Was it free on Amazon? Did I get it in one of those itch.io charity bundles? Ghosts? Who knows.

CCFWTBT is a platformer where you, as an acrobat called Belle (along with her pet bell called Chime) have to rescue her boyfriend who is kidnapped by an ex-friend. It plays out like a 8-bit title, different levels, tricky platforming, bosses, and so on. You use Chime as a sort of boomerang that can activate things but also help you reach places higher up. Getting used to Chime and how to use it took a while.

Between levels you have a map you can freely navigate, with various places to visit like an inn and a town, where characters give you side missions. Most of these involve revisiting levels once you’ve obtained extra items or abilities. This was one of the reasons that I got a strong Shantae vibe from the game, which is no bad thing. It’s not as good as games in that series, but it’s better than the vast majority of these retro-styled platformers.

I loved the cast of characters and their relationships. There’s a fun twist near the end regarding the kidnapper too (which I won’t reveal) which meant the game was a fair bit longer than I was expecting. I didn’t complete every side mission but I did a fair few of them, and (of course) completed the main game. If I didn’t have such a huge backlog of games I’d probably go back and mop up some more bits but, sigh, time, eh?

Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is a silly little game where you, a bored child left with your uncle while your parents have gone on summer holiday (leaving you behind to go to summer school because you’re bad or stupid or something), decide to get a driving licence, a car, and then modify it so you can drive off into space. Obviously. And just LOOK at the art style. Look at it.

It plays out as an open world game where you collect items of rubbish that you can spend on car upgrades, and find money to buy items, weapons and so on. There are missions where you have to find stuff or go places, and loads of weird characters to meet. Like the guy who is clearly burning alive on the beach but refuses to listen to you saying he’s fine until you return later to find his charred remains and nick his sunglasses. For the guy in a back alley who wants you to help him do crimes, but not really bad crimes, just middling crimes. Or the kid who fences stolen cars. Or the fast food seller who is legally bound to give you “beach fries” for free whenever you ask, which you then take home to feed your fish with. It’s all very silly.

As a game, it’s a bit flawed. The physics are a bit wonky and the collision detection is terrible. Platforming is harder than it really needs to be partly because of the camera and partly because you can’t gauge depth properly. Some of the missions are a bit too vague to understand what you need to do, and the minigames (like yoga and football) are fun for a while but tedious when you have to do them enough times to hit a quota and complete a task.

That said, it is such an absurd game it really does have to be experienced. If only for the strange squashy pets you can “make” that follow you round for seemingly no purpose.

Lonely Mountains Downhill: feeling stylish

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One of the things I really appreciate in a game is if it makes me look good, full of style, skilled in a way that I’m not in real life. Elaborate swordplay leading to combination hits; parkour across a cityscape; flying through buildings and structures with no effort and no fear. Many games make me feel stylish – or maybe the correct word is cool? – but there’s something about Lonely Mountains Downhill which excels in this aspect.

It seems an unlikely match. Mountain biking is hardly the most graceful of sports, with constant bumps and rattles; the game isn’t effortless either, with me constantly feeling just a tiny bit out of control. Nothing illustrates this better than the Free Rider mode of each mountain, which loses all checkpoints and tasks you with getting to the end without crashing; I’m managed to do this on just two courses. By the end of the course I was almost shaking with nerves, so much so that on one attempt, with just a couple of corners to go, I just cycled into a tree.

Not stylish at all, right? But the feeling when you get through a checkpoint, when you successfully land a jump off a cliff onto a sloped stone below, when you barrel down a steep hill and turn sharply at the bottom to meet the longer path – it’s exhilarating, and makes you feel that you can do anything.

Oddly enough I don’t get the same feeling from Lonely Mountains Snow Riders. Maybe it’s because that is a bit easier to control (skis are less unwieldy than a bike) so I don’t feel like I’ve beaten the odds every time I complete a section.

I’ve finished all the beginner challenges from the first two mountains now, and a few of the expert ones. The game is really lovely to look at, with a stylised art design which feels solid and complete. Sometimes scenery gets in the way of the path you’re following, which is an intentional decision but maybe removes you from the game a little. It’s pretty much never getting in the way though.

Which is more than you can say for the trees.