Cat Me If You Can: 725 cats hidden in black and white, and a camera for proof

The three-dimensional hidden-object genre has exploded in recent years, and it has a problem: most of these games are pretty but empty dioramas where you click objects to empty a list.

Cat Me If You Can fixes that with two decisions, and they are what lift it above the pile.

First decision: black and white

The worlds are drawn like a black-and-white comic, in three dimensions.

That is not only an aesthetic choice, it is a legibility choice. Without colour, the eye cannot sort by hue, it has to sort by shape and line. A white cat in front of a hatched wall demands attention that colour would have made unnecessary.

And incidentally it looks superb. The scenery has the thick line and flat areas of an inked page.

Second decision: there are puzzles

This is what most competitors lack.

Not every cat is simply tucked behind a crate. Some sit behind a riddle, a locked door or a contraption you have to work out. You decode clues, you open passages, and every solution releases more felines.

The game advertises over fifty quests and puzzles, which is enough to turn an object hunt into a game in its own right.

The content, in figures

Nine handcrafted levels across three themed worlds.

Over 725 cats to find, photograph and love. You capture them with a camera, which is a better idea than simply clicking on them: it forces you to frame the shot, and therefore to look.

The settings draw on real cultures, from the sands of ancient Egypt to the streets of modern Japan by way of medieval castles. And the studio pushes the concept all the way: cats working medieval jobs, cats reimagined as creatures from Japanese folklore.

For whom, and at what pace

This is a game with no failure and no timer, with adjustable difficulty and a stack of comfort options. It plays on a pad or with a mouse.

It is exactly the format you launch for twenty minutes in the evening thinking you will find two or three cats, and close an hour later with a stiff neck.

The game launches today, developed by Cosmic Stag Games and co-published with Craftmos Games, with no reviews yet. Expect a GTX 1060 and eight gigabytes of memory, which is more demanding than its comic-book look suggests: drawn 3D is expensive.

The genre's only real risk remains satiety. Seven hundred and twenty-five cats is a lot, and nothing says you will want them all. But this is a game you can abandon at 300 and pick up three months later having lost nothing, which is precisely the deal.

How many cats are you on? The counter is compared on the InsertCoins Discord.