I love cats. They’re cute, fluffy, vaguely murderous – what’s not to love? It’s therefore entirely unsurprising that when I was given the opportunity to review Cattails, I almost died of excitement. I’d heard the game had been compared to Stardew Valley, which is another game I adore. It sounded amazing, even too good to be true. After all, it can be hard to pull off a good tribute while also providing a new, engaging experience. So is Cattails copycat or purrfection? Read on to find out!

After a brief opening sequence (it’s heartbreaking, don’t say I didn’t warn you) and a text-heavy tutorial, you’re welcomed as the newest member of a wild cat society. You choose one of three colonies to join and from there it’s essentially up to you.

If you’re at all familiar with Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon, much of Cattails’ gameplay will be familiar. You have significant freedom when it comes to how you spend your time and which skills you choose to focus on. Mechanisms such as mining, dating, and foraging are very straightforward; they are essentially identical to those in Stardew Valley. There are festivals where you can play games, win prizes, and celebrate the season. Likewise, there is an overarching plot to bring back the guardian who lives in the Sacred Temple, which is very similar to the Community Centre restoration project in Stardew Valley. However, there are no apparent consequences for ignoring this if you’re just into the sandbox-style gameplay.

Coco isn’t a fan of the sad backstory, either.

The game is careful to set itself apart from the rest, though, starting with various basic mechanisms. For example, in contrast to human-centric RPGs where food and hunger are often taken for granted, in Cattails you have a hunger meter that is constantly depleting. Hunting (and to a lesser extent, foraging) must become second nature if you want to survive. Similarly, cats aren’t constrained to silly human constructs like “bedtime”; you can stay out as long as you like, provided you’re healthy and satiated.

Another fun aspect of Cattails is colony rivalry: each region of the map is controlled by one of the game’s three settlements. You can defend and expand your colony’s territory by winning battles or using skills and items. This adds a bit of excitement to the game and ensures you never run out of things to do. There’s also some top-notch humour scattered throughout, which simply adds to the game’s unique personality.

These aspects of the game are delightfully refreshing. Cattails doesn’t hide its inspirations, but the developers have clearly devoted significant time and energy to making sure this game can provide a fun, fresh experience for veterans of the genre and newcomers alike.

The item descriptions are mildly morbid, and I love it.

If the gameplay wasn’t enough, the game’s audio and graphics are great. The soundtrack is simply delightful, offering a variety of tracks to set a different mood for each season. Likewise, the graphics are charming. The sprites are very cute, for starters. You can customise your cat’s fur and eye colour at any time, or purchase new colour upgrades for your fur. If that’s not enough, you can also purchase accessories like sweaters and scarves to make sure you’re always on-trend. Yes, I spent my mews, the feline currency, on a sweater instead of a veggie patch. No, I don’t regret it one bit.

While occasionally the colours seemed a little flat and dull, the animations generally captured feline movement well. However, there were a couple of exceptions to this. For example, the sprint animation was simply the walk animation sped up, and this felt like a bit of a cut corner, more on that to follow.

I chose to ignore that the game considers pets “accessories”, though. Yikes.

As much as I loved the game, it’s not all smooth sailing. Aside from the occasional weird animations as described above, I also experienced an issue where the game would fleetingly pause when the weather or lighting changed. Changes in the weather are also extremely abrupt if you’re outdoors when it ticks over to the next game day. There’s simply nothing fluid or even vaguely realistic about transitioning from full frozen winter to a thawed-out spring in a single frame.

Similarly, although the UI and controls were decent, they weren’t flawless by any means. In particular, cycling through your inventory without opening the menu is dreadful. Despite being able to have up to 60 slots in your inventory, you can’t actually cycle through them in reverse order. If you miss the item you wanted to select, there’s nothing you can do except either cycle through your entire inventory again or open up the menu and select it manually. To be clear, these things are not enough of a problem to impact on gameplay, but it was disappointing as the rest of the game was largely enjoyable.

What a purrfect way to end the year!

I went in with high hopes and open eyes, but in the end, I did find Cattails to be utterly delightful. Is it a revolutionary game? No, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t do some new and interesting things. Moreover, the gameplay is well-balanced, well-rounded, and simply enjoyable. Cattails isn’t flawless from a technical standpoint, but the game is chill, fun, cute, and satisfying in equal measure. And if you really needed another reason to pick it up: cats.

Thanks for reading! For another cat-centric game, you should check out Claws of Furry. Or, if simulators are more your thing, I recently reviewed Project Highrise, a skycraper simulator – don’t knock it (down) til you’ve tried it! And, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter to keep up with the latest and greatest Nindie content – you can find me here.