Cat And Ghostly Road
Cats are spooky animals. We all know this, and I’m really glad to see a game that plays right into the idea that cats are otherworldly beings who see and know things beyond a human’s ken. Is the game good? I have mixed thoughts, but I appreciate its existence, at the very least.
My cat pitifully call for help every night. He’s fine.
Cat and Ghostly Road is a point and click. You follow a cat who lives with an artist in the mountains. One day, a demon steals the artist’s soul, and it’s up to the cat to save their human from doom. It’s a point and click, but with fewer things to click than, say, Botanicula , and fewer winding paths than Broken Age . It’s much more pared down, though I don’t believe that necessarily works in its favour.
Me, all the time
For the most part, Cat and Ghostly Road doesn’t deviate much from the standard point and click formula. You have to click on the appropriate objects in the appropriate order, and when you do so, the appropriate action to progress triggers. It has a few exceptions. The cat has multiple special powers, including the ability to see spirits (a power which I believe all cats have), and the power to change sizes. There are also minigames to overcome certain obstacles, though these are clunky and very much break the flow of the game. On the whole, it’s the powers that play smoothly into the narrative, and they complement the narrative progression nicely.
Example of powers
That said, Cat and Ghostly Road still suffers from the same issues as any point and click. At multiple points, I stalled out, trying to figure out what I was meant to click that I hadn’t already clicked, or stumped as to what inventory items were meant to solve the obstacle in front of me. Cat and Ghostly Road’s very linear progression limits how confusing this can actually be, but the flip side of that coin is significant potential to get extremely frustrated.
that’s what she said
The strength of a point and click, and what it ultimately relies on to overcome the frustration inherent to the genre, is its world-building and the story it’s telling. Point and clicks are meant to be a way to thoroughly explore a world and all its myriad components, with the clicks leading the player deeper and deeper into that world. In the case of a game with limited clickable objects, though, that ability to dive into the world becomes more and more limited. The player starts to see the world only as a series of puzzles rather than a world with problems to be solved.
This is very much the case with Cat and Ghostly Road. Though the art is nice and the concept is fantastic, there is not enough of the world to engage in when the puzzles become frustrating. Instead, there are only building blocks, and an unclear blueprint in which to slot them. Cat and Ghostly Road has a lot of heart behind it, but heart isn’t enough to carry one through a world of the dead.
Developer: Bov
Genre: Point And Click
Year: 2020
Country: Unknown
Language: English
Play Time: 3 Hours