Little Kitty, Big City Review

There is a unique beauty to playing an Animal Game. Humans are complex and mostly awful creatures, so the escapism offered by slipping into the role of something more adorable is always a surefire hit. Little Kitty, Big City offers its premise almost entirely in the title – the what, and the where – before the game starts with a heart-stopping tumble from kitty’s favourite sunny snooze spot. Your furry self falls from the window ledge of an apartment building to the street below like Kratos descending into Hades; only the street is not all that scary, just a little alien and full of new experiences for an apartment-raised kitty.

The game’s goal is simple enough – find a way to ascend back to your sunny perch. It is a long way up for a little kitty (in a big city, no less) and made all the more difficult when you realise you can’t climb on an empty stomach. So begins your initial loop of helping other street-level animal friends to snag some fishies for food and power up your paws to make the long vertical trek home.

This joke has layers, and none of them are amusing to the dog

The Big City part of LKBC is precisely as big as it needs to be, with the scale of your adventure feeling purrfectly proportioned to your smaller, slinky self. Squeezing between holes in a fence or toddling along the top of a wall reveals pathways and areas that yearn to be explored for goodies or new friends, with the game’s spot-on progression and pacing meaning you’ll get there sooner rather than later. The progress-halting obstacles in the world are represented by realistic kitty-foibles – such as a grumpy dog or pools of water – with the majority of them vanishing when you apply a little animal logic to the problem at hand. A dog enjoying a bone is far too busy to care about a kitty walking past, so why not drop one into the pooch’s food bowl? All the logic is refreshingly simple and endlessly charming. It’s all a little bit Untitled Goose Game, just without the malevolent evil at the core of your actions.

This world also breathes with a particularly pleasing sense of life when you start interacting with the other creatures who call the City home. These learned beasts have spent a little more time on ground level than you, and are happy to share their wisdom and collaborate on their own fun schemes or ask for assistance. Every single animal friend has a plethora of fun writing to enjoy, bursting with punnery and clever retorts. I did not skip a single line of dialogue – it was all top-notch, and showcased the care and attention that the Double Dagger crew poured into its endearing supporting cast. Even my daughter, as young as 6, was easily grasping and engaging with the humour on display – joining me for a hearty laugh when encountering a chameleon who clearly didn’t understand what camouflage was meant to achieve.

Become ungovernable

This adorable attention to detail even permeates the game at a mechanical level, offering a simple set of controls that capture the identity of being a cat brilliantly. Dropping low to sneak up on a bird feels epic, having dedicated buttons to knock things off ledges is unabashedly cat-like – there are even a range of cat-emotes to discover and deploy at your leisure. Jumping can be as simple as tapping a button and leaping in a direction, but holding that same button down will actually offer a plotted target to leap towards – demonstrated with a pawprint marker – to make your finessed traversal more accessible, a godsend when you start to ascend to the world’s upper portions. This couples beautifully with the wall-climbing effort, a Breath of the Wild style stamina system that expands as you find snackable fishies within the game world – each one adding further verticality to where you can clamber. And a very special nod has to be afforded to whoever named the sprint action “zoomies”, because that just rules.

Even when you are not openly progressing a specific task within the game, the world yearns for a cat-like curiosity to be savoured. The simple childish joy I felt when I knocked an opened tin of paint off a billboard and had it careen to the street and spill all over a car was immense, the game, naturally, having an achievement that addressed precisely such an action. Experimenting with weird routes across rooftops and air conditioning units will yield secrets to unlock amazing kitty hats for your furry friend (and plenty of Gashapon machines also await shiny coins to give you even more) so every corner of the city is ripe for adventure.

Really my only gripe was some hairy collision at times, with some precise jumps made slightly difficult by way of my furry friend apparently phasing into a nearby object. In most cases, I could awkwardly eject myself from this predicament, but on at least one occasion I did find myself confined to a truck wheelbase and needed to restart my game.

Looking good, feline good

Final Thoughts

There is a special category in my heart for a game that offers a precise and calculated afternoon of good clean fun, and Little Kitty, Big City is an ideal fit for such a thing. The kind of game that you whip out to engage with loved ones who may not be all that close to gaming, to show them that the space is not just gloomy headlines and violence-blaming – it can be full of wonder and innocent charm. If you are a cat lover, you will love this game. Even if you are not, I challenge you to play this game and resist the urge to crack a smile.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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