Reviews: Super catboy

Spoiler free review of the game Super catboy played on the steam deck Oled.

About the game

Super Catboy is an action-packed platformer created in a high-bit pixel art style, combining the best elements of the golden 16-bit platformer era of the 90s with some ‘pawsome’ new mechanics! And let’s not forget; there’s plenty of CAT CONTENT!

Steam page

Margot’s stats

• Device: Steam Deck Oled

• Difficulty: One setting

• Completed: yes - main story

• Time: ~3 hours

• Summary: A pixel art platformer. Charming art and game, that was let down by its writing and character creation. It was still fun to play.

• Score: 6.5/10

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Ok, ok, I was interested in this game because you get to be a cat. As you will see over time, I love a good animal character and cats are a big favourite for sure. But it is also pixel art and the style really reminds me of my favourites from the 90’s.

Narrative

The story and characters are the weakest part about the game. I kind of wonder if it would have done better as a roguelite concept. The jokes are cringey and the side kick character is out right annoying.

I ended up skipping through the later dialogue for sure.

But as a basis, you are an escaped experiment and haven’t been brainwashed yet by the evil doctor “Ungefug”. Weirdly his name is not translated, which I am sure adds to some of the confusion around the story. The word “ungefug” in German has a meaning of mischief or a want to cause trouble.

So you are escaping from him but also fighting his other creations (mostly dogs) to stop him from causing more chaos.

The enemies are easy to beat for the most part. I completely missed the fact that you can scratch as well as shoot a gun. So my first boss fight took me a bit longer until I noticed the gun shooting mechanic.

In terms of narrative, this story is simple, which is fine but not well executed. You just don’t really care for the characters or want they are trying to achieve. In a way this is fine as there is some decent basic platforming and a very simple puzzle at the end. And comparing the game to its look-a-likes from the 90s … did they all have good stories?

Here I must admit that I have never completed Sonic the hedgehog, and I guess the story is very similar about trying to defeat the evil doctor. No wonder I felt nostalgic playing this.

Pixel Art

The pixel art is very reminiscent of its 90s inspiration. I am seeing Sonic the hedgehog in this especially. Gameplay wise this is more like a Mario, with a lot of jumping and some climbing.

The art was effective in setting the scene around the different levels and signalling that you are moving along in the story. Each main section tended to have a theme, like a forest, a mining system or a train for example.

These are realised nicely with a tad of a comic esque style. I enjoyed looking at the backgrounds and liked the world design.

Gameplay

First of enjoy some of the gameplay I recorded below. It gives a good example of how collectables and enemies are placed and the types of platforming challenges.

Apart from the general platforming, I wanted to call out the clever gamification within the game. Each level contains a certain amount of coins, enemies and a 4 piece cat puzzle to collect. When you complete the level you get a score based on how many pieces/coins you collected / how many enemies you beat. You then get access to each level in a chapter navigation, so you can go back and beat each level to 100%. This could be fun to do to get a couple more hours out of the game.

The coins and puzzle pieces are never hidden in a too difficult way but some involve risky jumps / falls of faith. This was a nice fun addition, harping back to similar mechanics in other games.

Verdict 6.5/10

In summary, this is a nostalgic platformer, with direct inspiration from games such as sonic the hedgehog but the story and characters are less well executed. In the end I just wanted to beat the final boss battle. I did have fun with it (apart from one sudden much harder platforming section) and you can easily get around 3-5 hours gameplay out of it especially if you want to be completionism. This game does not re-invent the wheel of gaming, but it provides some fun and for me acted like a nice achievable palette cleanser in between bigger games that I want to tackle next.