A Building Full of Cats provides you with exactly what it says in the title.
I recently reviewed Sudocats by the team at Devcats, a team that really seems to like cats and developing games that involve cats. Sudocats was a sudoku game with cute pictures of cats, and A Building Full of Cats is a hidden object game in which all the hidden objects are cute cats. They certainly have a theme.
You have been sent to a five-floor building where the tenants have all temporarily left with the job of finding and petting all the cats so they don’t get lonely. That’s about as much premise as you’re getting for A Building Full of Cats, but honestly, I don’t think you need much more than that. There’s a rather nice title screen that presents you with a set of elevator buttons to choose your floor, and once you’re there all you need to do is point and click at all the cats.
There are roughly fifty cats on each floor, many of which are easy to spot, but with a good number that will require a more thorough scouring of the environment. Each one is a fairly simple design, but this feels deliberate so that they blend into the monochrome background more readily. You have a counter in the corner to help you keep track of how many you’ve found, and discovered mogs are highlighted nice and clearly.
Each floor also has a few secret kitties hidden behind objects, which is a nice touch. Many are in logical places too, such as behind sofa cushions or in drawers. I liked this fact as it meant I didn’t need to click on each and every object to try and find a secret feline. Ones I found felt sensible and not needlessly esoteric. I feel as though they could have been more creative, mind. There was a particularly neat one that was hiding in a light fixture that you could only find if you turned the light on to reveal its shadow. I wish there were more creative hiding spots like these. You can even find one or two cats hidden in menu screens, and I’d have loved to have seen more like this.
The different floors certainly look individual in design, with nice old-fashioned homes mixed with a rock star’s apartment giving plenty of places to ensconce mousers, both obvious and less so. A little more disappointing is that the structure of every level was the same though, thanks to them always having a main room and one side room. Again, a bit more creativity here would have been very much appreciated. What there is though, is very nicely done, with pleasant artwork that’s used in interesting ways to hide your charges within it. I’m not convinced I’m really petting a cat that’s inside a photograph, but it’s cute all the same.
I really liked the soundtrack, which is mostly by free music maestro Kevin MacLeod. I don’t take issue with this, as what’s there is quite fitting to the levels you’re on, so there’s been a concerted effort to make sure there’s a theme. A couple of sound effects round out the whole show though, with some that certainly sounded recycled from Sudocats.
A Building Full of Cats is certainly a nice enough time waster, but it is very short, with me finding all the cats, including hidden ones and various ones in menus in easily under an hour. Yes, there’s a low price point, but once you’re done there’s little reason to go back. If you can live with that, and you really want a cat-themed hidden object game, as niche as that sounds, then I don’t think you’ll be able to find a solid alternative. Purrfectly pleasant, albeit light on content.
A Building Full of Cats is available now on PC, Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch.
