Ostatnie recenzje napisane przez użytkownika Katosepe

The Cat Lady is what happens when a great story gets tied up by subpar game design. Fortunately, the story is the most important aspect of the game so don't necessarily turn away just because of that.

In fact, the story is what undoubtedly drives this game home and is what will stick with people long after the credits have rolled. The dark and macabre story of a suicidal woman looking for her reason to keep going is not for everyone but it will resonate with anyone who has been touched, directly or otherwise, by depression. Throughout the seven chapters of the game, you will have to make several choices that don't seem to have a right or wrong answer. I haven't played through the game a second time but on the first playthrough, these choices made me feel as though I was not only making a difference in the storyline but also I felt that I was the character, an impressive feat considering I'm a 24 year old male and not a middle aged woman.

The choices are masterfully crafted so that you don't feel pressured towards any particular answer. Unlike games like The Witcher, however, where this is done to make you feel like you have to choose the lesser of two evils, The Cat Lady makes these choices feel perfectly natural. An early conversation has a psychiatrist asking you questions about your life. At this point, no backstory has been given about Sarah Ashford, the main character, so you have to choose what feels natural to you. If you are like me, you may see no reason to lie and will answer truefully to your real-life self. Perhaps, however, you don't trust this man asking these questions and choose to lie. Either way though, the game has already made you feel at one with the character and it happens so easily that you hardly even notice. There are a few minor slip-ups throughout the storyline but as each person will approach the game from a different perspective, your results may easily vary.

Unfortunately, the writing is easily the best aspect of the game. The voice-over actors do a very nice job at their respective roles but the written dialogue sometimes feels at odds with their performances. The common use of all caps and multiple exclamation marks feels forced, especially when the actor's speech doesn't sound any different from before. There are also several typos and glitches, even though the English dialogue seems to be the default. For one early character in particular, the spoken dialogue repeated frequently despite the text moving normally and later, for every line of written dialogue, she repeated every previous line up to that point from the whole conversation. These were minor but noticeable enough to detract from the experience.

The gameplay itself also mostly felt contrived. Adventure game tropes abound as you have to determine the correct level of minutiae the game expects of you. You will find that often you know what to do but not how to do it. I spent several minutes trying to figure out how to make coffee at one point. The game wouldn't let you make coffee directly from the kettle, despite there being an option to do so, because it needed to be filled with water. Despite having two sinks nearby, I couldn't seem to get water from them. Little did I know that I needed to fill it with water directly from the kettle. Other times, you will have to open a door before entering it (as though someone may want to try entering a closed door) or lift the toilet lid before using it. Inconsistency strikes though during item mixing, something thankfully rare in The Cat Lady. At one point, when you have two items that need to be combined, you can simply combine them from a menu item once you're holding both. At another point, you have to use one item on another but you can't do so from the inventory. Instead, you will need to put the first item up somewhere before using the second item as though you were using it on the environment. Finally, one point in the game requires you to find a specific phone number and despite having seen the phone number multiple times throughout the chapter, you have to find it in one specific area, ignoring the giant signs plastered around. These may seem like small gripes but they are constant and feel needlessly specific, preventing you from doing what you already know needs to be done.

The Cat Lady uses a unique control scheme that uses only the arrow keys and the enter button to perform every task the game requires. I have to give them credit for making the game work this way as it is very simple if you learn to use it right. However, during my 8ish hours with the game, I could never get it to feel perfectly natural. The down key will bring you to the inventory while up will interact with the environment. Enter brings up menus on items and makes choices while left and right will move you around. Text is continued by using the arrow keys. Some people, I'm sure, will grow to enjoy the inventory system but it never quite felt natural for me. The real problem though, with this is the fact that arrow keys skip text. Frequently, pauses occur between lines of text. When checking if I need to be moving, I found that I would accidentally skip text when it suddenly appeared. Fortunately, this only happens for observations and not spoken dialogue (which can't be skipped) but it was still a major nuisance.

Finally, the graphics felt limited and stiff to me. The character animations was like watching puppets move and while the art was fantastic, the movements just felt wrong. The game's use of color is great, mostly sticking with black and white unless emphasizing something with color, but sometimes I couldn't tell what something was entirely supposed to look like. For example, I could never get a grasp of what the main character was supposed to really look like on a detailed level throughout the entirety of the game. Sometimes, I'd be convinced she was supposed to look quite a bit older but other times, I doubted that this was the case. I simply couldn't tell from the graphics alone.

That may sound like a lot of gripes about a game I'm giving a positive review towards but I can't stress enough that the reason to play this game is for the story, and it is presented masterfully. I'm almost loathe to play the game a second time because I don't want to discover that I didn't have as much free will as I initially thought but the first time through, it felt like the story was entirely moved by my decisions. I felt I had the freedom to do almost anything, make any choice that I wanted. This is a rare feat in any game but especially in an adventure game, a genre almost always steeped in linear progression. The story is poignant throughout the 8-9 hours it'll take the average player to complete and will be especially meaningful to anyone who has dealt with depression in their lives.