Steam Library: Cat Quest

Cat Quest – this is my little New Year’s miracle.

I didn’t want to play this carnival of non-stop puns or write about it at all. The screenshots on the Steam storefront looked too much like some incomprehensible mobile game. There was something about the pictures that was just off-putting on an instinctual level.

That’s why it was even more surprising to discover that these local isometric adventures are addictive. You start the game just for a minute, launch the main menu, go through the inevitable tutorial, make sure you didn’t make a mistake with your prediction, and forget that such a title even exists in your library. In fact, it only releases its grip on you after two hours of virtual kingdom exploration. Who would have thought?

The prologue of Cat Quest is as follows.

Just don’t roll your eyes.

In the cat kingdom, things are restless. In the middle of a chrestomathic fantasy land (European forest summer, meadows, dungeons, and dragons), a drama unfolded in the castle, and ancient evil awakened in the world. While Cheshire bookmakers are taking bets on whether the first is connected to the second, a regular villager from nowhere wakes up as Dovakot. Yes, the game actually says Dovakot. You haven’t met Lara Croft yet and haven’t run through the Cat Fields. Naturally, fate has prepared a difficult path for Dovakot across the entire cat continent and harsh trials: unraveling the tapestry of epic quests, learning to walk on water, discovering the origin of his power, and leveling up to level 99.

In short, worthy goals for a gamer.

And yet, how did it happen that I confused a full-fledged game with a mobile imitation? The first impression turned out to be false, but the second attempt showed that… no, the visual style of Cat Quest is indeed similar to a set of entertainment found on Google Play, and there’s no escaping these associations. Take the same camera, suspended in clever isometry, in which you quickly recognize various Asian “role-playing” time and wallet killers, more than anything else.

And here, there’s also the picture with flashy animation, comic book outlines, and a characteristic, I don’t know how to put it better, schematics of everything. When four cube-houses with windows on the entire wall, a sign that says “Tavern,” and two kittens make up a whole village, and six bushes huddled together are considered a forest.

In reality, CQ is not a mobile game port at all, it’s just that the mini-map has turned into a real battlefield. And it’s not a tactical battle, where yes, we are used to such tricks, but an arcade one, with stabbing and slashing, rolling and casting spells in all directions.

The gameplay itself is ridiculously simple. The hero runs back and forth, slashing cute (mostly) little monsters for coins, clearing caves, and also taking quests in local towns and villages to clear caves, chop up cute (mostly) little monsters for coins, and run back and forth. Occasionally, the hero encounters healthy bosses along the way. That’s it.

It’s not easy to detach from endless sword swings, dodges, and non-stop fertilizing of the land with two signature spells. The elementary but soulful action, plus the same map that you can’t help but love after 10 minutes of gameplay, only start to get boring after n dozens of caves with loot and quests. And as soon as you complete another quest, your hands immediately reach for a new one.

The secret of the local hypnosis lies in a thousand details surrounding the main process. For example, you don’t need to “talk” to any of the characters by pressing a separate button. You simply approach, um, cat-people, and the dialogue starts on its own.

Or take the equipment system. Instead of ten thousand useless broken copies, hoods, and other magical staffs, the game gives you a dozen “class” sets, parts of which are found anew each time, and the first time you find them, they simply increase your level and bonuses. If you like the Ordinary Sword, wear it and never switch. Just hope you’re lucky with the lottery chests.

In short, the mechanism is simple, but calibrated to perfection. Throughout the heroic journey, you will practice the same one and a half tricks with your ears and consume the same kind of jokes about the crossbreeding of cats and pop culture, but nothing, nothing in this virtual world will come between the gamer and their game. No inconvenient menus, no unnecessary clicks on the screen, only gameplay.

Even the immediately convenient controls were taken care of by the designers. While your humble paranoid was searching for where his double bottom in CQ opens, the project turned out to be not for touchscreens, but for a gamepad with a couch. And even before this obvious fact, I only realized it by connecting the PS4 controller to the PC. To try another game. Well, Steam didn’t care about the client, why the gamepad was turned on, and they reconfigured all the game prompts for me to use the sticks with the triggers.

The essence of the anecdote: if I hadn’t been patted on the shoulder, I wouldn’t have noticed the catch and happily played through the entire Cat Quest with the pre-set WASD, E for interaction, and numbers for special abilities layout. The control of console adventures on a non-native keyboard and mouse was set up properly right away.

If you think that a competent translation of console controls into computer language is just a familiar detail, then you simply haven’t played enough ported projects.

In summary: the initial alarm was false, the process is simple and generally does not become more complicated during the play, but playing CQ is a pleasure. I can’t think of a better recommendation for a little entertainment than parodying “Skyrim” cats.