I've never been so mad at a cat before...
Ok, when I saw this on the front page I wasn't sure what to expect. The art style reminded me of Coraline, while the dark, moody atmosphere coupled with the childish, almost dreamlike music seemed to draw me into thinking this game was going to be cute, or creepy, or maybe even have a narrative along with it about this cute witch girl saving all the forgotten cats lost in the forest. I didn't get that, really, but I think I'm ok with that.
What I DID get was a clever puzzle/skill game with the simplest mechanics turned into a pleasantly complex experience. That's what I like to see, honestly...you take an idea and you run with it. You run with it until you can't run no more and you come out with a simple but challenging game. It's good design at it's most basic.
As I started playing though it became increasingly difficult to hide my growing ire. Simply put I could not handle the STICKY CONTROLS. Game reviewers constantly thrown out this catch phrase and I don't think I've ever really, truly known what they were talking about until this game! It wasn't a matter of the game being difficult, it was a matter of me not being able to get the game to do what I wanted it to do! There were so many times that I would pull a cat in one direction and it would just not respond, then I would assume it was stuck to the ground and jerk it up and down a bit to break it free, at which point the cat would fly screaming into the air, hit a bat, break the connection, and plummet to it's rated PG death! In other cases I would try to pull a cat gently through a tangle of bats or branches only to watch as the cat either ignored my tugs entirely or would bounce up and down in a lazy arc as if Sally's magic was incapable of holding it still. With the timer counting down on the length of time Sally can hold onto a cat, it seems counterintuitive to have the cats take so long to lose their momentum. It's amazing that something so simple as pull mechanics can grate on my nerves so effectively!
I'm sure that if I had played the game long enough I would've found a way around these control issues, but for the last straw: I had been struggling with this cat bouncing around in mid air in slow motion, my tugs either having too much, or too little effect on it's trajectory, and the cat, as if DARING me to set it on fire meanders into bats seemingly of its own will, when, I finally got the last cat close enough to smell burning fur, the screen lazily fades to black and concludes that I failed to rescue all the cats in the alloted time. I stopped playing right then and there.
I can understand a game being hard. Heck I can understand a game being IMPOSSIBLE! I've played impossible to beat games before. PAC-MAN is an impossible to beat game! But the difference between Pac-Man and Sally's Cats is that Pac-Man never made me feel like it was the game's fault that I lost. It was always, "Darn I wasn't fast enough on that turn," or, "I should've expected that ghost to catch me in the corner." It was never, "GOD DAMMIT PAC-MAN TURN LEFT! NO! LEFT! WTF PAC-MAN DO WHAT YOU'RE TOLD!"
*sigh*
On a completely different note I was kinda confused by the tone the game was trying to set. On the one hand you have cute animation and an even cuter concept with saving kitties from bats with magic bungie-chords, and on the other you can set the cats on fire and earn achievements for doing so... Are you trying to be cute or macabre? Pick one, you can't be both.
I give you a 7 out of 10 because I know someone will love this game and spend hours carefully guiding cats through wooded mazes, but I personally, while impressed by the concept and art style, find the control scheme sticky at best and infuriating at worst, making it hard to have fun playing the game and stick around long enough to beat each level.
I will say this though, there's nothing like setting a cat on fire to vent frustration...assuming you can maneuver the cat into the fire in the first place of course.
