Super Catboy

I spent a few hours with Super Catboy expecting a quick nostalgia hit and came away with something more mixed - charmed by the craft, mildly frustrated by a couple of rough edges, and genuinely won over by the soundtrack. This is a debut title from a two-person German studio, and once you know that, a lot of its ambitions feel quietly remarkable. The pixel art is not pastiche; it is specific, considered, and at its best during the later stages where the environments shift from snow-capped mountain passes to a derelict factory, a haunted manor, and a sky fortress. Every biome reads as its own mood, and the background assets carry real detail that most small teams would skip. The move set is built around a melee combo, a pistol with pickable ammo, a directional dash tied to dedicated shoulder buttons (skip the double-tap mapping - it fights you), wall-claw sliding for scouting ledges, and enemy-head bouncing for vertical mobility. Special weapons like a flamethrower appear as temporary pickups, but dropping them the instant you jump or melee is one of the game's more maddening design decisions, and the Steam community has noticed it too. The level-end grading screen tracks coins, kills, and pieces of collectible Maneki-neko statues per stage, which gives completionists a hook beyond simply reaching the exit. Boss fights are fair and well-telegraphed, even if most bosses cap out at three or four attack patterns. The difficulty is uneven - long stretches are breezy, then a gun emplacement section or a particular boss will spike hard with minimal post-hit invulnerability. There is no difficulty toggle, which is a gap for players who sit on either extreme. Where Super Catboy earns genuine affection is in its variety interjections. A motorcycle chase level, a mine cart segment that nods directly at Donkey Kong Country, a train level where the background scrolls fast enough to feel genuinely kinetic - these moments break the standard run-and-gun rhythm and reveal a designer who grew up studying how 16-bit stages were paced. The music holds up its end throughout; it is motivating without becoming repetitive, and it sells the aesthetic in a way that generic chiptune loops usually fail to do. The story is thin - cat escapes lab, cat fights dog army, cat defeats mad scientist - but it is told through short pixel-art cutscenes with enough personality to stay out of the way. The weaknesses are real but bounded. Enemy variety in the regular ranks is thin; most grunts either swing melee or fire straight ahead, and the combat loop can feel same-y across the middle portion of the game. Character customisation is absent. The dash-in-midair restriction confused more than one reviewer. And the runtime, somewhere around four to five hours for a casual first clear, will feel short to some. Whether that is a flaw depends entirely on what you want from a single-session side-scroller. For a game that knows exactly what it is and ends before it outstays its welcome, that length is an honest fit.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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