Cattails: A Wildwood Story
Played: January
Things I liked:- It's a Stardew Valley inspired game with cats. This part is self-explanatory. I will now go on to explain.
- The art is so precious. Even though Glimmer isn't my favorite character, their sprites in particular are so cute and expressive.
- On the same level, the music in this game is absurdly good. My favorite track so far is probably Autumn Festival.
- I like that the cast has a few cats who are just unambiguously mean. As much as I love Stardew Valley, I think it would benefit from more characters whose rudeness isn't softened by a facet of their backstory, but who are just... genuinely kind of terrible to be around.
- The gameplay is a LOT of fun. It's a bit simplistic and repetitive, but the variety of things to do every day and the difference in foraging/hunting throughout the seasons make every gameplay session feel unique.
- I absolutely adore the museum. It's such a fun concept and such a fun area.
- The decoration system in this game is top-notch. I love the variety of items you're given, the amount of space you have for them, and the decoration system itself is simple yet robust. I spent probably a good 45 minutes just placing trees around my colony.
- The amount of control the player is given is also fantastic. There's arachnophobia-friendly options, a whole host of difficulties, and a variety of accessibility options.
- I am so glad that you can romance two whole godlike beings of incredible power. I love it so much.
- I hate the dodge mechanic in this game. In Cult of the Lamb, the dash mechanic gives you a lot of forward momentum and ends up being a way the game naturally varies your movement. In Cattails, the dodge mechanic makes you stop in place briefly, and is difficult to diagonally manuever. This doesn't sound bad in theory, but in practice, the result is a gameplay mechanic that went largely untouched and was frustrating to use when the game required it. It doesn't help that the way the game teaches dodging uses a mechanic that never comes up again.
- The style of combat that the game encourages you to take (one involving running, dodging, and precise timing) makes sense for a cat character in a cat-themed game. However, it frequently makes extended combat sequences feel tedious and repetitive. Short combat sequences with specific skills work fine, but many stages in the boss arenas just don't feel good to play through.
- I hate the mines. I hate the enemies in the mines. I hate that rest stops are TWENTY-FIVE (!!!) levels apart instead of five, like in Stardew Valley. I hate the amount of energy it takes to mine rocks. I hate the dark levels. I hate the lava levels. I hate
- I don't like the inventory system. I think controlling the stack limit is a good idea, but capping it at nine feels so ridiculously small. I think it would've worked better if some items just stacked more, but the majority only went up to nine.
- As much as I enjoy every character using they/them, I don't think it has the right effect. In stories where not every character uses they/them, the characters that do are very obviously signaled as nonbinary. But in Cattails, a lot of the otherwise very gendered characters using they/them makes the characters spiral around to feeling less nonbinary. Several of them are very clearly gendered (like Charlotte, Ellie, and Bob), and some of the pairings feel similarly gendered (like Ellie + Chase or Bob + Buttercup). You can see in the game's fan spaces that there are a lot of people who'll refer to the otherwise genderless characters using very gendered language, and this doesn't get significant pushback compared to games where the presence of only a few they/them using characters makes them stand out as particularly nonbinary. I kind of wish the game took a harder stance on this, either referring to the colony as all enbies or something similar, or just gave some of them gendered pronouns. That being said, the player character using they/them ONLY is very funny and I like it a lot.
- I kind of wish this game had more colony management, to avoid starvation, sickness, etc., but this is more of a personal desire than an actual critique.
- Cats
