I’m going to confess something. There are some games I play in this series that I don’t end up reviewing. This isn’t because I can’t find anything to say about them - I think these reviews show that I can say quite a lot while saying nothing at all just fine - but because I play so little of them due to how I’m playing them, or run into bugs that make them fundamentally unplayable. If I can’t play enough of a game to understand what it is or how it works through no fault of the game’s own, I’ll give it a pass and move on.

It’s sometimes tricky to decide if issues are the game’s fault or mine, and if they are the game’s fault, whether or not to review them as such. I skipped reviewing Alum, for example, because a bug made all the dialogue auto-skip. The game was still playable, but skipping the dialogue in a game like that misses the entire point of the game. I gave it a pass. I played about forty minutes of Alone before the game corrupted itself and became unplayable. It’s a twenty hour game, so again, not enough played to get a sense of it. I passed. It’s an arbitrary system, up to my own discretion, and I am fickle at best.

So I’m reviewing CatMafia.

I don’t think any of those numbers mean anything.

CatMafia is an action arcade game. You play as a cat escaping from a heist. Faced with a small horde of various creatures, the cat must gun them all down to escape with his newfound riches.

In theory, there are multiple weapons the player can cycle through. The player also has a health pack, and the game theoretically be played with a friend, if you hate your friend and want them to hate you too. This is a game you play to end a relationship, a break-up text of an experience, designed to wound on a fundamentally cruel level. It grates at the mind, scours the soul, and calls into question whether the development of human civilisation and the evolution of culture and technology that brought us to this point was ever worth it in the first place.

I’m not a fan.

I will make you bleed.

I can see your incredulity. This is an arcade game with a gangster cat. It can’t possibly be that bad. And sure, it’s not the worst game ever to be belched into existence.

But it’s close.

The art and level designs are not my thing, but that’s okay. They are perfectly passable, and maybe even endearing to someone more fond of the style. For me, the game’s true horror begins the moment the same two lines of music evocative of 90s pornos drone through my speakers. They drill into my mind, over and over, on an endless obnoxious loop, a threnody not even the sweet kiss of death can release me from. It drones, over and over, and even when the game is over, it continues, a scar across my mind.

The only distraction from it is the gameplay itself, and this distraction is a brief one. Enemies move across the screen, too fast for me to manoeuvre in any kind of meaningful way, so I instead stand at the edge of the screen, firing my gun until the bullets run out and I am overwhelmed. The game tells me to switch weapons or to reload, but these buttons do nothing, or if they do, they’re too slow to stand a chance against the charging horde.

I wonder if this is how a villager felt as they stood with their staff, watching the advancing Mongol horde. Did they understand there was nothing they could do to change their fate? That everything they had been taught was moot in the face of something so unstoppable?

Did they hear the 90s porno drone?

I call out to thee, my gods, that thou carry mine soul gracefully into the great unknown.

There are people who have beaten this game, and I admit, I don’t know how. I accept that I may have missed something somewhere, that maybe my button mashing skills are inferior to everyone else’s. I see beating this game not as a test of skill, but more as a test of will. This is a game they use to train CIA recruits to resist torture. This is how monks on the edge of starvation see through to the hell on the other side. There is no victory here, no success, except to escape intact.

I hear it. I hear the 90s porno drone.

I hear it.

Developer: Imperium Game

Genre: Action, Arcade

Year: 2020

Country: Russia

Language: Russian

Play Time: 40 Minutes

Youtube: https://youtu.be/MwRIafEU3Jw