Catniss around the world

I love this game! You can really tell that a lot of care went into the hand-drawn characters. The gameplay completely hooks you, and there are plenty of challenges! :) I think it’s a really great little game at a fair price. I highly recommend it to everyone.

The story is non-existent, opening with just a short intro and a few images of a cat peacefully napping in the forest before some monsters show up and ruin the calm atmosphere. As for the cat’s abilities: you can jump, run, and perform a spin attack to deal with enemies. The running itself is not especially useful, but it does help with making longer jumps. You can also defeat enemies by jumping on their heads or by throwing a knife. The knife can be thrown endlessly, and one clever detail is that it sticks into surfaces, allowing you to use it as a temporary platform. You do lose it when you die, but it can be recovered by collecting knife icons scattered throughout the stages. Unfortunately, those icons do not respawn, so each one can only be collected once. Progression is level based, with stages completed in order or selected from a simple menu once unlocked. Although completed stages can be replayed, there is very little reason to return unless you are chasing high scores. None of the collectibles have any real impact beyond adding points. The main collectibles are coins, followed by rarer gems and golden stars hidden in each stage that are worth the most points. There is no counter showing how many collectibles are hidden in a level, but finding everything is not too difficult because the stages are mostly linear, with only the occasional hidden platform leading to a secret item. The adventure begins in forests and caves before moving to locations inspired by countries such as Italy and Norway. While the backgrounds are charming and blend nicely with the cartoon style of the cat and enemies, the different settings rarely affect the gameplay. Most stages still rely heavily on wooden platforms, with spikes remaining the main obstacle throughout the game. Spikes and bottomless pits kill you instantly, while enemies simply remove one heart upon contact. Thankfully, death is never too punishing thanks to frequent checkpoints and the fact that you lose almost nothing after dying. Collectibles remain collected, and only enemies respawn, which makes retrying sections much less frustrating. All of the currently available stages can be completed in less than one hour. Nothing happens at the end, and there are no boss fights. After finishing the game, you are greeted with just a simple message promising more levels in future updates, which makes the game feel more like an early access title than a fully finished release. Another annoyance comes from the grind heavy achievements, many of which have overly excessive and honestly ridiculous requirements for coins, points, and deaths. For example, one achievement requires dying 3000 times, while I managed to finish the entire game with fewer than 100 deaths, most of which happened while trying to collect everything.