I’ve just posted a review for For the Cats!
I was impressed by this game, and I think it has more depth than its blurb might immediately suggest. I encourage people to check it out!
3 Likes
I played this game today and I agree it has a lot more going on than a run-of-the-mill cat rescue.
It utilizes a simple and effective storycraft technique: provide the protagonist with a straightforward goal, then explore more complicated desires and needs of all the story characters while the simple goal is achieved. I would have liked to have learned more about the town (e.g. Is it some sort of post-apocalyptic industrial setting? Why is coal the currency? etc.) and the people who live there, but, even so, there are quite a few hidden details to uncover.
I liked the replayability as well. It’s a fairly short game so multiple plays don’t take too long, but having different protagonists with different choices, and different consequences for those choices, greatly increases the variety of the final story each time you play it. Also, having multiple endings with neatly labelled titles and numbers made it much easier to navigate the full scope of all possible stories. I haven’t worked with Ink before. Is this part of the standard authoring system or just a good design choice by the author?
Makes for a good lunch hour game and definitely worth checking out.
2 Likes
Yeah, an excellent little bit of storytelling. It’s a shame the cover and blurb weren’t stronger.
No, otherwise the interface looks only lightly modified from their editor Inky’s default html output, but numbering the endings is something the author did. An easy thing to do, but a really nice touch. I played for 20 minutes and found all but number 4, and each of them was interesting.
2 Likes
I had zero interest based on the blurb to be honest. It made me think it was going to be some preachy Very Special Episode thing about animal abuse, and also left me wondering what galaxy the game is set in where a random person could charge money for excess cats instead of begging and pestering everyone they knew and blowing up Facebook just to get someone to PLEASE take them for free.
But ‘post-apocalyptic industrial setting’ is a whole nother story, I’ll likely check it out now just based on that.