Little Kitty Big City

(available on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X & S, and PC. Nintendo Switch version used for this review)

Little Kitty Big City opened a Nintendo Direct recently, and sort of looked like a cross between Stray and Untitled Goose Game. It’s essentially a game where you play as a cat that’s been knocked out of a high rise, and you have to figure a way back there by completing certain puzzles for various animals around the city, with parts being locked off until you gain new abilities.

It’s very simple, and in terms of game length, it’s not particularly long. It’s still well put together, being made by Seattle-based Double Dagger Studio, who do an interesting cartoony art style, that I like.

The game does try to give you a bunch of extra challenges to do, some of which are useful to unlock extra parts of the city, and eventually getting back to your house in the high rise, but once I figured out what particular item I needed to get back, I just focused on getting that and finished up my playthrough. I did miss a couple, but I was surprised that I didn’t actually miss too much by the time I was done with my playthrough.

PROS

• Controls

The cat actually controls very well, you get a decent jump and you hold it down to do an extra wide jump, you have to learn how to crouch and pounce to get birds- whose feathers are used as currency, you get some extra emotes for the cat (outside of a few puzzles, they’re a little useless), and yes, in the Switch version, you use X to meow.

My favourite aspect of it is that the left and right triggers are used to swipe using the cat’s left or right paw. You’ll also need to pick certain things up, for example, there’s a bird I found that ruined a smartphone and can’t tweet anymore, so you have to steal another person’s phone and give it to the bird- I’ll leave you to figure out how you get the phone off them!

There are also a lot of optional challenges that use trigger buttons, like landing all of the footballs in goals that are around the city.

The city itself is interesting to explore, the environments don’t change all that much, but for a small open world, it’s actually really fun to explore.

MIXED

• Puzzles

The puzzles are mostly alright, I barely had to look up a guide for the unnecessary ones, though there are a few times where it’s easy to become stuck on what to do next- particularly when it involves parts of the city you can and can’t go to.

I think my favourite puzzle was reuniting the ducklings with their father, that one was fun! I will say that depending on how many puzzles you decide to do, does affect the final portion of the game in an interesting way.

• Game Length

Little Kitty Big City isn’t too expensive, at least in terms of paying for a luxury… On Steam, it’s currently £20.99, though it’s actually not very long at all- I think you can beat this game in about 3 to 4 hours if you’re not going for everything.

Weirdly, I went through the game with the perception that the Untitled Goose Game was longer, but to my surprise, they actually have about the exact same length depending on which method you want to play the game in.

If you think that that length of play is too dear for £20, then I would say skip this one until there’s a price drop, since there’s not too much that you can do to artificially lengthen the game. I did a few puzzles and achievements and got all of the fast travel points before I got to the final portion of the game, and getting back to the high rise doesn’t actually end the game completely, you can go back down to the city immediately and finish off what you need to do to check off your list.

The only thing I didn’t do was get all of the big collectibles in this game, and that was the hats, and there’s a reason for this: the cat looks ridiculous in all of them, and I never equipped any of them. Mainly it’s due to my aversion to animals wearing human clothes, but I couldn’t be bothered going around for all of these. If you have a need to collect all of these, more power to you.

CONS

• Frame Rate on the Switch

I can’t speak for the other versions, because even though at the time of this review, this game is available on Game Pass, I didn’t download the other versions for this review. But I did see footage of those versions, and I had a bit of envy- because the framerate on the Switch is significantly lower and suffered a lot more with performance. Obviously, the Switch’s age is playing a factor in this, since a lot of releases this year have had issues when it comes to Switch, HOWEVER, I wouldn’t expect that a game like Little Kitty Big City would have these kinds of issues. I had slowdown on a couple of occasions, and while the framerate would usually stick at a good 30FPS, it did actually chug in a couple of areas.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Little Kitty Big City is a good, small, cosy game, and if you like that, it’s pretty good. I personally thought that it was an alright experience, but not one I wanted to 100%. I’m glad I played it, but it’s not the best indie game I’ve played and I think that for Nintendo Switch owners, there’s a lot of games like this that run a lot better- if you want a good cosy game that has animals in it, I recommend Spiritfarer! If you’re playing on a different platform and want a good cat game, I still recommend Stray.

FINAL SCORE: 7/10