Cat Lady
CW: This review contains discussion of suicide, self-harm, and violence. It also contains disturbing imagery.
I always find horror to be an interesting genre in games. There’s such a wide variety of ways to express horror, from jump scares to gore to the psychological, and it’s always interesting to see what creators believe qualifies as “horror.” What scares a game’s creator, and does it scare me as well? I find that it’s psychological horror that gets to me the most. Though a game like Dead by Daylight gets my heart racing and my instincts on high alert, it’s the ones that explore the inner workings of the psyche and the thoughts we don’t dare to have that I find are the ones that stick with me the most. It’s this type of horror that The Cat Lady aspires to be, though whether it succeeds is another question entirely.
Ah, you’re trying to scare me by making my life seem abnormal, are you?
The Cat Lady is a horror adventure game. You play as Susan Ashworth, a woman who successfully kills herself only to be turned away from death by the Queen of Maggots and forced to go back to the land of the living to rid the world of five parasitic people. Mechanically, this is a point-and-click adventure, with Susan needing to collect and use items to progress, though to put it in the same genre as Botanicula or Broken Age feels disingenuous. With Cat Lady, even more so than a writing-driven game like Broken Age, it’s the story, not how one interacts with it, that drives the game forward.
You sometimes have to click weird things.
One of the challenges I sometimes face as a reviewer is reconciling my personal opinion with a more objective reading of the game. Fundamentally, as a reviewer, I am evaluating whether a game succeeds at what it’s trying to achieve. For many games, what that game is trying to achieve doesn’t interest me, and so no matter how well it succeeds, I will never enjoy it. This is also why you’ll see very few games like Call of Duty or similar war games in this series. However well-made they may be, they are not the game for me.
With The Cat Lady, I face a similar question. I enjoy horror games, and though I have my disagreements with point-and-clicks, I do see them as effective vehicles for the right kind of story. Don’t get me wrong, this is exactly the right kind of story for a point-and-click. Forcing yourself to engage with the fixtures in the setting, to actively make the choice to move forward, to inflict violence, it enhances the horror in a way that other genres can’t capture. The slow, plodding pace of the voiceover narration forces the player to listen. It is well done, and does a great job painting the picture of the world Susan Ashworth now finds herself in.
Did I mention the subtlety?
Though the story starts as an exploration of death and the decision of suicide, it rapidly turns a corner into something more sinister. Any discussion of suicide will inherently include discussion of violence, but the situations into which Susan is thrown go well beyond that violence and verge into torture porn. There is, again, nothing wrong with including torture in a game when it is necessary to advance the story the game is telling. However, in the Cat Lady, the torture sometimes seems to exist for itself rather than the exploration of the narrative it’s telling. When people are subjected to brutal violence, it’s always important as a story teller to ask what the ultimate goal of that violence is. Taking violence lightly and as a mean unto itself as a narrative device cheapens it and subjects these characters to horrific suffering for nothing.
It’s debatable whether the horrifying violence in The Cat Lady is necessary, and it’s why I’m unsure of what my final opinion is. Though I understand the goal of exploring why life and death are what they are, there are ways to do that that don’t involve torture, murder, and the brutality depicted here. Whether this is violence simply for violence’ sake, I can’t decide, but I am confident that, for all it’s well-constructed aspects and its story, The Cat Lady needs to ask itself a question about its love of torture and violence.
Developer: Harvester Games
Genre: Horror, Adventure
Year: 2012
Country: Poland
Language: English
Play Time: 10 Hours