Semantic Nonsense: Caturday in Tuesday

I believe that you can understand a motivated choice by understanding how a person perceives the incentives and disincentives of a given situation. I believe the most sure-fire way to test your priorities is to put them in conflict with each other.

I also believe there are two entities in this world whose decisions can never be comprehended: Nintendo (zing) and cats.

Perhaps it is pure folly for me to put myself in the shoes of a cat, but that didn’t stop me from doing it twice this past week.

Perhaps we should add a third entity to that list, because I have no explanation as to why Steam has a dogged insistence to do demos as limited-time marketing events. I downloaded the demo to Little Kitty, Big City when it was temporarily available for the Steam Next Fest, which coincided with me traveling back home for my cousin’s wedding. I wouldn’t get a chance to play it at all during the fest, but I downloaded it anyway in the hope it would still work later. That hope, at least, was not folly.

The demo features what appears to be the very beginning of the game which unceremoniously dumps the titular little kitty into the titular big city. As is natural for a game (and useful for limiting the demo), little kitty doesn’t start at their full power, and must explore and progress the story through a fetch quest to become more capable.

…Not that I did that. I spent my time with the demo running around, playing with cat emotes, trying to catch birds, and ruining paintings. Who has time for doing what the game wants me to do when I can walk in front of somebody to trip them, causing them to drop their smartphone, pick up the smartphone with your mouth, dash through a hole in the wall to avoid being caught by the newly de-phoned and angry person, and drop it in a pile of other smartphones I stole not because the game required it to progress but because it came to me naturally after discovering I could.

I’m fully invested in getting this game. It’s a delightful sandbox for just playing a cat. It has Snowy’s endorsement, too, capturing his attention like he was one of those cats on Twitter watching Stray.

While we look forward to Little Kitty, Big City, another game, Catlateral Damage Remeowstered echoed from the past. It took a long journey to arrive at my console. Starting 10 years ago as the fruit of a game jam competition, passing through Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter before its official release and eventually even reaching PlayStation VR. In 2021, the game became Remeowstered with some visual touch-ups, extra things to do and a rethink of the game’s progression flow. It took until now for Limited Run Games to produce physical versions that I could rent from Gamefly.

I offer no explanation as to why I hadn’t sought [game with cat] out at any point in the 10 years it has been available in one form or another. I suppose we have to add me as fourth on the incomprehensible list.

Catlateral Damage is the world’s premier first-person platformer set in various homes that have unusually large amounts of fragile items sitting on flat surfaces. The game’s design focuses on a single aspect of the essence of feline nature: a preoccupation with knocking things onto the floor.

Each of the game’s 10 main stages has you tear-assing through progressively larger domiciles enacting your cat’s petty revenge scheme against its owners. You’ll swipe, paw and bonk your way from tiny apartments to expansive museums. It’s a short game, so things escalated quickly from clawing curtains to toppling a T-rex skeleton.

While you can see most of what the game has to show you within a few leisurely hours, but playing for hours at a time really isn’t the point of Catlateral Damage. It’s about popping in now and then for some cathartic mayhem. As such, the real meat of the game is an unlockable mode that procedurally places targets in the levels and gives random objectives for your kitty to search and destroy.