I talked about Stardew Valley and the long shadow it casts over the casual simulation genre in my Bear and Breakfast review. I’ll save us all some effort and not rehash it here, but know that the points made there about games trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle still hold true for Cattails. If anything, they hold more true here than they did for Bear and Breakfast. I don’t necessarily want to spend this review talking about an entirely different game, however, or the genre as a whole. Instead, let’s just talk about cats.

Well, I’ve certainly been told.

Cattails is a casual simulation RPG a la Stardew Valley or Bear and Breakfast. You play as a cat, abandoned by the road in a forest, who must now make a life for themselves in one of the forest’s three cat colonies. This life consists of hunting, fishing, gathering, socialising, exploring, farming, and perhaps even love. A mysterious quest to restore the forest guardian lightly overlays the game, but it is largely up to the player to choose how and whether to engage with it. The point of the game is not the quest, but the experience and story the player builds for themselves along the way.

Cattails’ mechanics are fairly complex for its genre, with combat taking consideration. While they aren’t difficult mechanics, they do require a bit of planning and thought. However, the gameplay as a whole is fairly straightforward, with the skills you’ll need laid out in a tutorial. Once the tutorial is done, you’re spat out into the world, free to do what you’d like, with the sole measurable goal being survival.

This is Krampy, and he’s the best.

It’s in this idea that there is no real goal but the one you set as a player that I struggled with while playing the game. While there are daily tasks and the overarching goal of restoring the forest guardian, it’s not entirely clear what the incentives are to do these things. Similarly, while I can fight other cats to expand my clan’s territory, it’s again unclear as to why I should or would do this. The forest seems fine, so why do I need to restore the guardian? The other clans aren’t particularly bad cats - indeed, all the clans gather and can be talked to at festivals - so why do I need to fight them? The game doesn’t offer any particular incentive for me to do these things other than my own sense of fulfilment, but that sense of fulfilment isn’t really enough to keep the game going or to make the days more distinct. The game lacks any real sense of progression.

This got me thinking about the nature of games about cats more generally, and the question of whether a game using a particular species embodies that species, or just uses it as a skin. Cattails’ lack of progression or incentive poses a problem if I approach the game from a human perspective; however, a human perspective is not the only possible perspective. The game purports to tell the story of a cat, and cats don’t feel a sense of progression. They don’t have long-term goals or plans, but take life day by day. Cattails is an RPG where you play as a cat, but perhaps it has the greater goal of also asking you to consider the world through a feline lens. Cattails works best through the meandering, ambling view of a contented cat.

It makes sense that cats are cat-pitalists.

Once you accept a feline perspective, Cattails becomes a much more enjoyable game. It ceases to be tedious, and instead becomes a game of exploration and adventure. Flushing out and pouncing on a frog or a dove or a mouse becomes the goal in and of itself, with each new map giving a renewed opportunity to engage in the fundamental adventure of being a cat. I thought about my cat, Athos, and how she used to go prowling through my garden, pausing to nap in the sun or roll in dirt. To me and my human perspective, it was the same landscape every day, but for her, the patches of grass, tree roots, and shady spots brought new smells, new experiences, a new adventure to explore. She wasn’t working on growing a garden or building anything in particular. For her, it was enough to experience what the world had, and to derive joy from it. This is a game that asks me to adopt Athos’ perspective on the world, to live for the moment without regard for the future or what I ought to be doing with my future. It asks me to forget that there is anything greater than the here and now, that I have obligations and ways to develop myself. I am a cat, and that is all I need to be.

I am abysmal at this. I need a goal, or I go a little mad. I need a sense of building and progression, or I thrash against the wall. I need structure, or I flop into a heap, repeating the same action over and over at a vain attempt at a cathartic tarantella.

I am become death, destroyer of every small animal in this forest.

Cattails is not a bad game. I think it’s a fairly good game that retreads as a shadow the groundwork laid by superior games, understanding the essence of what made them successful without understanding how to recapture it for itself. Cattails tries, and for some, it will be a sweet and compelling little adventure. For me, though, the lack of structure or incentives renders the experience hollow and tedious. While there is joy to be derived from exploration or the thrill of the hunt, when it’s the thirtieth mouse of the day or the tenth empty map, it’s difficult to see that there is much joy left to eke out from what’s left. Cattails asks me to use a feline perspective on the world, to live for the moment rather than with a greater plan.

Alas, I muse. It seems I am human after all.

Developer: Falcon Development

Genre: Rpg, Simulation

Year: 2017

Country: United States

Language: English

Play Time: 20 Hours

Youtube: https://youtu.be/9EPGe2zJ68Y