The Purring Quest

My first honest thought loading up The Purring Quest was that this feels less like a game pitch and more like a love letter someone decided to ship on Steam. Valhalla Cats was founded by a Spanish telecom engineer who left his career to chase two things: cats and games. That origin story saturates every pixel of this release, and for a certain kind of player, that sincerity is the entire point. The game puts you in the paws of Kimchi, a cat whose grieving owner wanders away from a graveyard and leaves him behind. The setup carries real emotional weight - reviewers consistently compared that opening to the first minutes of a Pixar film - and the story threads a quiet message about pets as anchors for human pain without hammering it into your face at every checkpoint. Along the way, Kimchi crosses five levels spanning a graveyard, a village, a gothic quarter, a city, and skyscraper rooftops, meeting a small cast of real internet-famous cats: Oskar the Blind Cat, Henri Le Chat Noir, Nala, and others, each with dialogue that lands somewhere between genuinely funny and charmingly awkward. The collectibles system rewards exploration in a satisfying way - every cat you rescue and item you find gets added to a room on the main menu screen, building a little feline sanctuary that updates with your progress. The presentation is the game's clearest achievement. The animations were crafted by a veteran traditional animator with studio experience, and it shows: Kimchi pulls back before a leap, licks himself while idle, and crumples in collapse with an accuracy that most games built around animal characters skip entirely. The orchestral soundtrack sits at the softer end of the atmospheric spectrum - unhurried, slightly wistful - and it suits the pacing well. The hand-drawn backgrounds are genuinely beautiful, though they occasionally work against you by making it hard to read which surfaces are platforms and which are decoration. That readability problem connects to the game's main weakness, and it is a real one. Controls across keyboard and controller have a floaty, slightly delayed quality that several reviewers flagged independently: Kimchi builds momentum slowly, jumps feel imprecise when combined with that momentum, and the double-jump input on keyboard is particularly awkward. The stealth sections, where you hide in boxes to slip past patrolling dogs, have timing that can feel inconsistent. There is also a health system quirk where certain instant-kill hazards dock health rather than simply resetting the checkpoint, meaning you can arrive at a section already at low health with no good option. None of this is catastrophic, but it means The Purring Quest generates frustration that belongs to the controls, not to the player, which is the kind of friction that a short game cannot fully absorb. Steam users with around 1,200 reviews land the game at roughly 81 percent positive, which feels about right: the goodwill is real, the rough edges are real. At two to three hours for a casual run, or three to four if you chase the collectible fishbones and caged cats, this is a session game, not a weekend commitment. There is a rhythm mini-game cameo tucked in there, and boss fights that each introduce a distinct pattern worth learning. Neither overstays its welcome. The developers also donate a portion of sales to animal welfare associations, which is either irrelevant to your purchase decision or a small bonus, depending on you.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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