Exceeded my expectations!

Which is pleasantly surprising for a game that seemed set up to disappoint me on just about every level. It's not that I thought it would suck, just that I thought it would look pretty and be cute in very predictable and played ways. The core conceit of “cat runs around a dystopian sci-fi city”—novel as it is—seemed like the kind of thing that makes a great gif but probably not a great game. I remember seeing that early footage in 2016 (back when it was still “Project HK”) and thinking as much at the time, half expecting the game to evanesce into eternally-longed-for vaporware as the developers realized there wasn’t much to the idea beyond compelling visuals and a solid elevator pitch. But by god, they did it!

The story isn’t much to write home about—it has its moments of predictable “tearjerker” tiktok-bait melodrama and it hits every one of the haha funny kitty moments that you would expect, but it pairs the predictable with just enough moments of genuine inventive charm and substance to create something really special.

I can’t even begin to wrap my head around how the environments look this good. On a PS4 no less! Need a 12-hour Digital Foundry docu-series ASAP. Was continually blown away not just by how pretty, but how communicative the game's visuals were. This is a game that cares so much about letting you take in its world, and it deploys so many neat visual tricks towards that end: the way the FOV widens as you move the camera up, reinforcing both the sheer scale of the bunker and the claustrophobia of the urban maze within, the way the quality of light shifts as you move through the games different distinctive locations, the subtle lighting cues that guide the eye towards objectives without the use of more overt waypoints, and probably a dozen more I didn’t even notice.

By the end, I really began to think of this as a game About Lighting. It goes beyond eye candy and design trickery; light is integrated so deeply and essentially into the game's narrative. To speak in too much detail would risk spoiling the most affecting parts of the game, so I will withhold specifics, but I think this is the thing about this game that’s gonna stick with me the most. Every major story beat, every move to a new location, every shift in mood and tone, is reinforced through lighting, and that reinforcement is so effective that it makes me wish this game had no dialogue at all—all of the most arresting narrative beats rely wholesale on the game's use of light, and I think it would hold up, zero modifications needed, on the strength of its lighting alone. The moments where you get a vantage point to look back where you came from and trace your path, recognizing the colors and lights you were immersed in minutes or hours before, a fluorescent trail radiating back at you out of the dark, telling your story in macrocosm through those little lights alone—magical.

Pet peeve of mine: when people say "it's not perfect, but..." because they feel the need to justify liking something they perceive as "objectively flawed." Objectivity isn't real! It's frustrating and disheartening that people so often feel the need to disparage their own tastes and aesthetic senses by treating them as subservient to whatever dominant cultural value system has established itself as the objective judge of Good Art. Who fucking cares!

Which is to say that this game is perfect, by the only metric that matters, which is that I like it a whole lot, which is all anyone is ever saying when they call a work of art perfect.