Indie Game of the Week 466: Cat Quest II

Last month I covered a couple of first sequels to games that originally debuted in 2017, which is a bad battlefield to be suddenly thrown into as a newcomer given that the games industry (at least output-wise) was firing on all cylinders that year, and somehow by pure coincidence that is true for today's game of Cat Quest II, which follows the 2017 original in providing a breezy, entry-level loot RPG for feline aficionados. At the time I didn't think too highly of Cat Quest: it has some very basic combat and character development mechanics to prop up all the running around a big world map, completing main and side-quests, occasionally delving into caves and purloining (or purr-lion-ing as the game's obsession with cat puns would have it) treasure, and a pretty light loot aspect where you'd be switching your equipment around as you found newer and better gear. It both looked and felt like the type of game you'd play on a mobile device that would typically be filled with ads and microtransactions; that sort of clean, bubbly, colorful, but basic visual style akin to most games made for that platform. (To the game's credit, at least in the EGS version there isn't anything that predatory involved; it was purely an aesthetic comparison.)

Cat Quest II is functionally the same game, though with the added feature of a second playable companion character. In multiplayer you'd get a friend to assist in your dungeon-crawling and cat-wrangling travails, though in the single-player it provides a sort of alternative build you can switch to as a means to compensate for enemy types that might be resistant to whatever your main character's rocking, or else be given all the support spells so that its not-terrible AI can toss buffs your way while you're fighting. If you lose one character you can revive them with the other, but it involves hovering over the former's body for a while until they pop back up which might be tough if the enemy that killed them is still all up in your grill. This unity between the two protagonists—a cat and a dog—is also relevant to what little story the game has, as the two work to bring together two warring nations of their fellow animals by being a sterling example of what can happen when the two species work together. Given the younger age group this game is seemingly aiming towards, it's about as straightforward a story of camaraderie and cooperation as you'd expect—especially given neither protagonist can actually talk, though they do emote—but it's just about enough to hook a main story thread upon. Otherwise, much of the game is about following the main questline and occasionally finding other things to do if the next mission in the chain demands a higher experience level for entry: that might mean checking out sidequests or delving into optional dungeons, all of which also carry a recommended minimum level limit. As is the case with any RPG that trucks in throwing numbers around, the level of both your characters and their equipment matters a significant amount, though with enough evasion and patience you could probably wear down anything the game might throw at you.

There aren't too many enemy types and the mid-bosses tend to have maybe a couple quirks. This dude likes to spend half the fight under an invulnerable shield which... well, that's always fun. Just standing there while it wears off.

The simplicity of the game's mechanics are both the game's biggest strength and its biggest weakness. The former in how it's a very accessible game and a workable introduction to the likes of Diablo or Path of Exile, neither of which really put up the sort of friendly, accommodating facade that you'd see in other "friendslop" couch co-op games from other genres. Back in the day, you'd occasionally see games like X-Men Legends or those Champions of Norrath EverQuest spin-offs that made for riveting in-person co-op RPGs that only slowed down occasionally when it came time to juggle inventories at vendors, distribute stat points, or switch around gear. By streamlining most of those processes, you create a game experience that doesn't necessarily need to keep stopping and starting, and there's plenty of value to that uninterrupted flow in a single-player context as well. Obviously, the weakness here is that the game doesn't have a huge amount of depth to lean on. You get a few spells that operate through an MP system that works more like a cooldown than a finite resource, given its rapid regeneration whenever you damage enemies, but besides a few weapon types to select between (which offer little in the way of mechanical variance, save that some are ranged) there's not a whole lot of customization potential at play. The game's total runtime doesn't quite hit double figures in hour length unless you're truly doing everything, yet even so it frequently feels like too little stretched over too much.

Then there's the constant cat and dog puns. You might ask, "Constant cat and dog puns? In a ten hour long game? They have to start repeating before too long," and boy howdy would you be right. It's not even the repetition that's the most irksome issue here, but the way the puns get ever more labored in trying to fit "meow", "purr", "bark", "pup", and other associated terms into every fantasy or superhero name reference they can invoke. I generally don't notice pun humor enough to be put off by it—lord knows I dabble in it often enough myself—but the sheer sweaty desperation of a lot of this game's wordplay becomes deeply irritating before too long, like it was the very last item on the development agenda and they had to brute force the things into every line of dialogue and place name to ensure every page of the script had at least one dog- or cat-related word shoehorned in before sending the disc off to be printed. (Or, well, the digital equivalent.) I never like to give up on any game series seeing how everything has the potential for growth and improvement but, much like the similarly samey and ready-for-phones Holy Potatoes series of time management sims, the cookie-cutter nature of Cat Quest does not make me all that enthused to check out its more recent third entry, which I hear has pirates in it. Or purrates, probably.

This is kinda what I'm getting at. We have a wizard feud going on here between a Voldemort type and a Dumbledore type, but you'd struggle to get that from this wordplay. It's like when you translate the same sentence through two languages a hundred times.

Cat Quest understands its audience—there wouldn't be three of them if it didn't—and I do appreciate the need for that sort of co-op-friendly, streamlined loot/action-RPG model to return especially in this age where something like Peak or R.E.P.O. can make an absolute mint by tapping into our desire to play something light and inconsequential with our friends in contrast to something like a D&D campaign that might require a bigger time investment from that same group, given various career and life priorities that might spring up as you all collectively get older and gain more responsibilities. Yet the shallowness of the mechanics, the cheap and cheerful look, and the sweaty and unrelenting pun humor don't really make for a compelling single-player experience in comparison even if it did provide some relaxing times where I could just hammer away at the list of nodes on the map to visit in a semi-focused state (in the sense that I would listen to a podcast or something at the same time, not play while I'm as high as a kite (though that probably would've improved the cat puns)). In its defense it feels like Cat Quest II is a sequel that understands the strengths of its format implicitly, given it puts the multiplayer aspect front and center with your two heroes here, so I can at least commend them for understanding that there's more than one way to skin a cat. So to speak.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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