We have previously played a bunch of hidden cat games over the last few months. Shy Cats Hidden Orchestra has a bit of a twist compared to the other games. I say we, because often these types of hidden object games lend themselves best to putting them on the TV and working together with your family and friends to find the cats on the screen. We played the Xbox version of Shy Cats Hidden Orchestra, which allowed Robin, Amelia, Amelia’s friend, Dann and I to all play together.
Shy Cats Hidden Orchestra starts out with just a few levels to explore, on a big TV screen. Each level has 20 cats that are hidden in the world. These worlds are each themed around individual colors or beautifully decorated areas. The cats, which are all over the map, have different instruments and collecting them forms a band at the bottom of the screen. Each cat adds more music to the level, as it’s otherwise silent. There is also a hidden chest and key in each level.
When we first started playing, we would get 19 out of 20 cats on the level, but there is no hint system for cats that are a bit tricky! It did say to find the key for a hint for one of the cats, so we found keys and opened the chests. Each chest contains a scroll which has iconography like three pink triangles or two flutes. At first, we thought that this was a hint as to what members of the band we needed to be looking for, but it wasn’t a very good hint at all. We kept going onto new levels, leaving the one cat left, as we really didn’t know where they were.
It turns out that “hint” is instructions for changing the band. At the bottom of the screen, you need to pause all of the musical cats beyond the ones listed in the hint, which then changes the scene and reveals a very easy to find final cat, allowing you to complete the game. Once we figured that out, it was much easier to actually form all of the bands and finish the levels in Shy Cats Hidden Orchestra.
Little aspects that lack polish, like this, are littered here and there; some of the backgrounds feel really low quality, and the controls don’t feel like they’ve had much care put into the sensitivity. There is a mouse cursor, which is fine, but when you open a chest for a key, instead of being able to tap X on the controller to close it, you do need to mouse over to the X and close it. It just feels a bit clunky!
The idea of the cats slowly forming a song, and then having to figure out what band the level wants to unlock another cat, is very fun and makes this game much different to other hidden object games we’ve played! After playing through a level, more levels appear, so there isn’t an end in sight for us! It’s also quite tricky to find all of the cats too, as so much of the scene moves and fog comes and goes, which means you have to look really carefully!
We all enjoyed our time with Shy Cats Hidden Orchestra, especially once we understood how to finish each level! It’s an easy game to play and one that you can end up spending a lot of time finding these cute cats.
You can play Shy Cats Hidden Orchestra on Nintendo Switch, Xbox and PC.
