High Cats

I came at High Cats from the wrong angle at first - I was looking for something with competitive hooks, a ranked mode, maybe a reason to keep the game installed past a Tuesday night. This is not that. High Cats is a local co-op and PvP platformer built around a single gimmick: four cats chasing a runaway tuna can across 27 side-scrolling levels, spread across three environments including Feline Forest, Cat City, and Siberian Suburbs. The core loop is simple enough to explain in ten seconds to anyone holding a controller. The mechanic keeping things from being a pure auto-runner is the catnip boost system. When your cat grabs catnip, you have to complete a randomly generated button sequence as fast as possible to activate the speed boost and pass it along to the next player. Miss the window and the tuna can pulls ahead. Nail it and you chain momentum between players, which is where the genuine chaos lives in four-player sessions. As a competitive angle it is paper-thin, but as a party trick that gets three other people shouting at a screen for 20 minutes, it actually works. The shared life pool - nine lives split between all four cats - adds a small layer of co-op pressure that prevents anyone from playing carelessly without consequence. The problems start when you look past that first session. The game is essentially review-free and community-silent since its 2018 release from Cape Town-based solo dev Indie Glue, which tells you something about its longevity. No online multiplayer means you need bodies in the room, full stop. Controller compatibility has reportedly been inconsistent with certain pads (PS4 controllers flagged as problematic in community posts), which is a real friction point for a game that lives or dies on plugging in four gamepads with zero hassle. Level design leans on memorisation of trap placements rather than reactive skill, so replayability past your first run-through of the three regions is limited unless your group is specifically chasing the level-clear high score loop. For someone like me who cares about whether a game has legs past one sitting - whether there is enough mechanical depth, enough competitive structure, enough reason to load it up again - High Cats comes up short. Solo play exists but it feels like a workaround rather than a designed mode. The four-character roster (Artemis, Ninja, Zoe, and Kiesha) is cosmetic differentiation rather than meaningful ability variance, so there is no build or loadout thinking here. The asking price sits in the sub-five range, which is the only context where the content-to-cost ratio makes sense. If you have three friends on a couch, controllers already paired, and need something that boots fast and explains itself in two sentences, High Cats fills that 30-to-60 minute gap without complaint. Do not expect to still be playing it the next morning.

Fred · Scout Team

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