Catie in MeowmeowLand

I went into MeowmeowLand expecting a cosy afternoon distraction and came out three and a half hours later having been pooped out of a giant cat, set a giraffe candlestick on fire, and watched a dachshund repeatedly get crushed beneath a reclining feline like some kind of Sisyphean slapstick loop. Slovak developer ARTillery has made something genuinely strange here, and I mean that as something close to a compliment. At its core this is a wordless point-and-click spread across 24 hand-drawn scenes. There is no inventory to manage in any traditional sense. You pick up and use items within the scene where you find them, which makes the whole thing feel less like a classic LucasArts adventure and more like an interactive picture book, the kind that trusts the reader to poke things until the world reacts. All dialogue happens through illustrated speech bubbles and a cast of characters who communicate in squeaks, growls, and the occasional emphatic meow. A hint-bird occasionally drifts in with a scroll when you've been stuck too long, which is a gentle, unpatronising touch. The soundtrack shifts mood from room to room, curious and whimsical in one scene, genuinely atmospheric in the next. The constellation puzzle level, where you arrange stars to form a cat shape against a deep-blue sky, is the kind of quietly enchanting moment that reminds you why you play games like this in the first place. The art is the obvious headline. Reviewers reached for Terry Gilliam, Studio Ghibli, and Salvador Dali in the same breath when describing it, and none of those comparisons are wrong. ARTillery has threaded cute and crude together with real craft, pastel colours sitting right next to full-on slapstick grotesquerie, and every background rewards slow inspection. The animation, across more than two hours of crafted sequences, holds up. The honest caveat is that the puzzle logic is frequently surreal to the point of opacity. The world does not have to make sense, and it makes clear from the first scene that it has no intention of starting. That works atmospherically. It does not always work as game design. Several solutions require clicking the same element multiple times in sequence with no clear signal that you should, and the clickable zones can be frustratingly narrow. You will lean on trial-and-error. Players who bounced hard off the moon-logic puzzles of older adventure games may find MeowmeowLand hits those same walls. To the developer's credit, a post-launch update added more hints to several scenes, which softens the roughest edges. At somewhere between three and four hours to completion, MeowmeowLand knows its length. It does not outstay its welcome. This is a game to sink into on a slow evening, ideally with someone else nearby to share the bewilderment, because the absurd scenes genuinely play better with an audience. It sits comfortably alongside Amanita Design's wordless catalogue, and if you came up on Samorost or Machinarium, the DNA here will feel warm and familiar even when the puzzles push back.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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