Apparently, there’s a necessity for mandatory cat games every so often right now, and honestly I’m here for it. Any game where you play as a cat, I’m in. In fact Stray is the only platinum trophy I have on PlayStation. So when Little Kitty, Big City was announced, there was a special level of excitement, especially after learning about all the friends you’ll make along the way. That is the real prize after all isn’t it? As a quick side note, bonus points to any game where you specifically play as a black cat, but that’s just sentimental value to me, and doesn’t actually get you any bonus points in the scoring, sorry.

Little Kitty, Big City is basically about as “cat” as it gets from a story perspective. There’s a black house cat that sleeps on the window ledge, only to roll over the wrong way, fall from the roof, slide down a slope, get launched by a bird, and basically be lost with no real idea how to get back. There goes one of the cat’s nine lives at the very least. From there, your goal is essentially to find some fish, because they give you stamina to climb, and make it back home. Along the way you’ll make some friends, help out some other animals (and an insect), and hopefully eventually make your way back home. You can also be quite the nuisance to the people around you by tripping them and stealing their stuff, like their phone or their food.

I want to point out the main “let downs” of the game briefly, so let’s just get this out of the way. First off, visually Little Kitty, Big City is not really anything special. I do like the emphasis on the characters being the animals and I feel like that’s why there was a specific design choice to not give the humans faces, but there’s also something kind of creepy about a bunch of Slenderman people wandering circles around a tiny part of a city until they walk off into the void.

Secondly, the sound design. Most of the sound effects feel like they’re stock sounds, like the overly animated slap when you hit a ball or anything that sounds like it’s out of every single 80s cartoon ever. Also, the soundtrack, while serviceable is nothing more than that.

Lastly, the controls. I’ll get onto the collectibles in a minute, but let me just point out there’s one specific collectible that requires you to climb a decent way up a building, jump on a ledge, and follow the ledge across the outside of the building to get in behind part of it to collect. The issue here is, I couldn’t figure out that this was the way to do it because every time I jumped on the ledge the cat automatically just followed through and jumped off the building as well. The last collectible took me longer to admit to get to simply because I figured I was trying to do it wrong. Thanks for that.

Alright, complaints aside, let’s talk about the characters, their designs, and their impact on the story. So basically, no one really matters at the end of the day past the first crow you meet because it teaches you about the fish that you need to climb the building to get home. Oh, and the tanuki because it opens a hole in time-space that lets you travel to one specific place you can’t otherwise reach, outside of that it just lets you fast travel.

Let’s handle this in order, the fish are a fun way to build up your Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom style stamina for climbing. Makes sense, as you’re a cat, so I can get behind this. The tanuki on the other hand, there’s something really unsatisfying about the idea of using this concept of a time-space wormhole that’s used to progress the story just once. The map isn’t big, I think I used the fast travel system a single time. Outside of that, I just zoomied my way around.

Throughout Little Kitty, Big City though, you’ll meet some friends that help you basically get your collectibles: hats. There are a bunch of hats to collect and while some are just laying around, others have side quests attached to them. For instance, helping a beetle understand it’s over-worked trying to help another cat run their social media account and be an influencer. It’s an interesting social narrative from the perspective of animals. That said, I don’t think anyone will be running out to give this an award for best storytelling, because besides that there’s just stuff like being a menace and running around with a knife which just feels randomly violent, even though you can’t actually hurt anyone. There are also tasks to just do cat things, like jump inside a few different boxes around the city, or find the perfect places to sleep.

As a whole, I think Little Kitty, Big City is really cute. It’s a fun little game that even managed to motivate me to get all of achievements for. It’s far from perfect, it’s definitely not going to be for everyone, but if you want something to play with your kid, or you just like games where you can be kind of annoying, then running around as a cat is perfect. If you want something thought provoking, I’m not sure why you read this far because the title of the game tells you almost everything there is to know about the game.

 

Graphics: 6.0 While I feel like I understand part of the designs that are going on in Little Kitty, Big City, I also feel like there was something more that could have been done with the people walking around the city than weird Slenderman-like things that you can trip.	Gameplay: 6.0 To say that this is a bit awkward to control is an understatement. It’s not broken by any means, but everything feels very loose, which means the cat will absolutely do things you didn’t actually intend. Much like a real cat.
Sound: 5.0 The sound is very basic, but everything at the very least matches up. You understand the sound of you smacking something, but that’s not the noise a cat hitting a football would make.	Fun Factor: 8.0 Regardless of anything else, I actually had fun playing Little Kitty, Big City to the extent that I went for all the achievements. It was a good 4-5 hour experience that anyone that really likes cats, has kids, or both should enjoy.
Final Verdict: 6.5

Little Kitty, Big City is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

Reviewed on Xbox Series X.

A copy of Little Kitty, Big City was provided by the publisher.