Little Kitty, Big City Review: A Pleasant Little Distraction

At times when I’m playing a particularly difficult or intense video game, my wife will look over at me and say, “You do this to RELAX?”.

And well, yes, I do. In the end, I enjoy the intensity and stress that comes from video games. That intensity can be a big part of why I feel like I’m completely immersed in a totally new world.

But sometimes, it’s a lot. I recently finished Hellblade 2, which is a game that features extremely intense combat and a character with psychosis. When I finished that game, with its very riveting and heated finale, I felt a bit lost. I wasn’t sure how to follow up a game like that. One thing was for certain, I definitely needed something relaxing.

So I followed it up with the only game that made sense in that moment… a game where you explore a city as a little kitty. Little Kitty, Big City isn’t close to perfect by any means, but it was just the pleasant little distraction I needed in that moment.

Open World, Metroidvania, Platformer, Cat Simulator

Little Kitty, Big City can best be described as an open world Metroidvania platformer. You play a cat who is trying to find his way back home, which is at the very top of a big building in the middle of the city. You need to explore a bite-sized city in order to get some stamina upgrades (which are fish, naturally) so that you have the ability to climb your way back up. As you explore, you can find ways to occupy dogs and unlock shortcuts so that the city becomes increasingly easy to navigate.

The world is just loaded with shortcuts and fun little things to find, which always kept me engaged. Everywhere I looked, I was finding something new to interact with. One of my favorite finds was various little soccer nets all over town, which you can claw soccer balls into in order to complete one of the mini-tasks in the game. Shortcuts are always super rewarding to find as well.

Outside of the aforementioned fish that upgrade your cat, pretty much every exploration reward in the game revolves around making your cat cuter. There are dozens of different hats that you can find, ranging from bunny ears to a frog to a witch’s hat. They are all adorable, and it can be fun to switch them up and find your favorite. There are those who get very motivated by costumes in games like this, and I think they will be delighted by exploring to unlock all the different hats for their cat. I am personally much more gameplay motivated, so I found it a bit disappointing that 90% of the rewards in the game are all cosmetic related. After I found a few hats that I liked, I felt pretty content and would have found exploration rewards that made my cat better in various ways to be much more satisfying.

I especially would have loved if there were any upgrades that somehow made the climbing and platforming more fun, as these are, unfortunately, the weakest points in the game by a lot. Just pressing the jump button leads to some very awkward platforming, so you mostly platform by holding down the jump button so that a line can guide you to where you are going to jump. You have as much time as you need to adjust where your jumps will go, but it is incredibly slow and can still be quite imprecise. There are many times when my cursor said I would land on a ledge, only for it to not happen quite as the marker indicated. You spend a fair bit of time hopping around different buildings and up ledges, so it’s a real bummer that doing this never feels great. Climbing on various vines is also a bit lackluster. For whatever reason, moving diagonally while climbing is incredibly slow in comparison to going straight up or straight to the side. This matters because you only have a limited amount of time to climb in the game before you fall, and many of the platforming segments include areas where you need to climb across vines. Whenever I was jumping or on vines, things never felt quite right for me.

Let’s Do Some Cat Shit

When you are on the ground, on a ledge, or on a kitchen counter that you want to be on, though, things are generally quite smooth. Video games are starting to get really loaded with cat games, and this might be the best “cat simulator” of them all so far. The aforementioned claw button is especially a delight, as you can use your paws to knock down objects whenever you want. Knocking pots, pans, and various other items crashing to the ground from high places just never gets old. You can trip random humans to snatch their items or nestle up to them as well. And of course, you can meow to your heart’s content. While some of the more traditional gameplay elements of Little Kitty, Big City can be lackluster, they give you just enough tools where fooling around as a cat stayed fresh for the entire 3ish hour experience.

In the end, that was all I truly needed from this game. I view Little Kitty, Big City as a charming little cat simulator that doesn’t overstay its welcome. It has plenty of flaws, but it’s the perfect palette cleanser. If you truly love cats and costume hunting, you could easily get a bit more mileage out of it than I did. But even as someone who isn’t a costume person or a cat guy, it charmed me enough where I had a genuinely nice time with it.

Score: 7.0/10