i’m a real serious gamer, i swear.

Fofino has the brain cell today.

An Arcade Full of Cats is a point-and-click object finding game. It has a slight plot - cats are scattered throughout time and must be returned to the present - but the plot is not the point. The point of the game is to pore over an image and click the slightly out of place objects found within it. The objects, however, are that perennial staple of Steam, cats. This is, like so very, very many games on Steam, a cat-finding game, where you, like some ancient hunter-gatherer must stare at a space and figure out just how many cats have invaded it and where they’re all hiding.

And it’s quite good.

I am the hunter of the tokens, the gatherer of tickets, and the receiver of the many pieces of candy. Hear me roar.

Like every game in this genre, the gameplay is very simple. The player is presented with an image, and must find the cats hidden within it. An Arcade Full of Cats, however, takes this a bit further by having additional cats hidden in interactable objects, as well as minigames where players find things other than cats, such as newspapers, bugs, or robotic fish. The combination of all these elements means there’s actually quite a lot of hidden object finding crammed into a relatively small game, making the game much denser than it would seem at first blush.

This density can sometimes become a bit frustrating, especially with the nested object cats. At some points, I found myself wildly clicking around a level, trying to find the last two hidden cats and being unsure of what would actually trigger a secondary action and what would not. I am also still unsure what the coin for the minigames looks like, having mostly just found it when I was wildly clicking. This frustration, though, could be mitigated through the use of the hint system, and the knowledge that what I was fundamentally frustrated about was that there was just too much cat-finding going on. It was fine. I survived.

i don’t even know where i am anymore

That frustration with being so close to the end, yet not finding the last few cats became less of a frustration through the sheer personality and magic of the game. While the title of the game promises an obvious arcade theme with cats in it, I wasn’t expected the sheer atmosphere and sense of fun and whimsy the game was actually able to cultivate. Each scene has its own music and easter eggs to discover, inviting the player to look more closely, and rewarding them for that attention. I kept catching myself giggling at a clever pun or a fun design because it genuinely brought me joy. There’s a happy, joyful simplicity to this game that I wasn’t expecting, and certainly wasn’t expecting to this extent.

Even within that sense of needing to scour a level, the minigames themselves provide a welcome break, giving an opportunity to look for something new and return to the level proper with fresh eyes. The player is at no point bound to any particular level or scene, giving them the freedom to wander, and come back when they’re ready to search and search again. It’s an excellent design for this type of game, and I was happy to take advantage of it several times.

I don’t know that either of them has the brain cell at the moment.

An Arcade Full of Cats is an item search game that fully understands the assignment and embraces it. Its colours and art are warm and inviting throughout, and its very game design invites the player to take each level at their own pace and in their own way. While I won’t pretend it’s completely without flaw, it’s delightful enough for me to ignore them and to leave this caper with warm, fuzzy feelings.

Developer: Devcats

Genre: Point And Click

Year: 2023

Country: Brazil

Language: English

Play Time: 1.5 Hours

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