Game: Cattails: Wildwood Story
Genre: Simulation, Indie, RPG
System: Steam (Windows), Nintendo Switch release planned for 2024
Developer | Publisher: Falcon Development
Price: US $20 | €19,50 | £ 16,75
Release Date: October 20th, 2023
Review code used with many thanks to Falcon Development.
Games featuring cats and/or dogs have become a staple, particularly among the cozy gamer community, and I approve. Furry friends are a delight, and now we can find them across so many genres, with no real-life problems like allergies or pesky landlords. If your backlog could use some more cats, Cattails: Wildwood Story features an entire feline cast! Let’s talk about it right meow!
I played the original Cattails and thought it was fun and unique. Each time I picked it up, I’d be hopeful that someday they’d make another game like it, with just a few quality-of-life updates. With this standalone sequel, they’ve done just that!
Lead a Cat Community
The story opens with you being given chief responsibility for a new settlement. In this role, you have a few ways to help and lead your friends. It’s up to you to attract new neighbours, which you do by donating the requested list of items per new cat (much like a Stardew Valley community centre donation). When someone does decide to join up with you, you choose where in town to place their home.
You can choose where to assign daily squads, which will fight to claim territory or gather resources. The resources they gather can be used to make various upgrades, such as a greater likelihood of finding better quality plants or building fast travel shortcuts. There’s a community stockpile of prey and plants, which grants bonuses when you’ve met the goals with your donations.
Above all, you’re in charge of restoring peace to the land. Dark, violent shadow cats pop up across any territory not claimed by your community, and you must find the source of the problem. By recruiting cats to join your settlement, you open up dungeons across the map, which contain puzzles and fights!
I very much appreciate that your room-by-room progress is saved in these challenges. If you lose a fight or otherwise don’t feel like committing to the whole dungeon at once, that is no problem. You can take time gathering more XP and resources before returning to each next chamber.
Strategic Fighting
You’ve got your basic attack, sneak, and dodge actions for combat, which is already more than you get in many other simulation games. Plus, you get to unlock and level up skills which activate and have cooldown times.
There’s an impressive array of abilities, making it feel strategic to choose which four you’ll have equipped at any time; switching them around can only be done at the scratching post in your home. For days when you’re not focusing on fighting, there’s even a variety of skills that help with exploring, foraging, and laying claim to territory!
Another way to plan and prepare for your current priorities is to “buddy up” with a friend cat. Once you’re friends with a cat, you unlock the option to have them follow you around; they’ll help you hunt, gather, and fight. Each one has its own perks, and they can level up and increase their stats. Only one cat can be with you at a time, so choose carefully! If your buddy’s HP is depleted, they will leave, but you can go right back and get them if you want.
What I found actually to be the most dangerous pastime is the mining! Down in those caves is where the game most resembles Stardew Valley; you’ll be looking for stairs, level by level, dodging enemies and hoping you brought enough food. There are more different environments than Stardew Valley has though, including puzzles and hazards, and you can fill a LOT of hours trying to reach every level of each mine, if that’s your thing! None of the story is locked behind your digging progress, thankfully.
Family and Friends
Regarding companionship and friendship development, yes, you can marry and start a family with nearly any cat you meet. Cattails: Wildwood Story carefully dodges committing to pronouns for many cats, so you can believe whatever you want about the gender identity of your protagonist and just about anyone else. I enjoy the effort the developers put into making the cats distinct.
Overall, many of the cats fit into personality cliches but in a way that serves to enrich your community, and each home is designed to reflect the preferences of its owner. Each cat looks distinct as well, which is impressive to me. Different fur, tails, ears, and coloration… cat fans will be pleased. You can change the appearance of your player character at any time, which includes a variety of hats and accessories that can be unlocked.
Buddy Up with a Cat
If you choose to have kittens, they really do get their looks from both parents and their own pair of skills so that you can “buddy up” with them, too! I loved discovering the personalities of my babies and dressing them up in my accessories collection. Other villagers started talking to me about my kids, which is a small thing but more than you get in many other games.
Cattails: Wildwood Story has a New Game+ mode. This is unlocked by having a kitten at maxed-out buddy level. It starts a new file for you with the chosen offspring as the protagonist, and a few bonuses carry over from the original file. Mainly, you’ll get to keep your den just as you had it and start with every cat already moved to your community. This is pretty fantastic! I do wish it would offer the option of choosing a different biome for your settlement, as that’s a draw for me to replay. Admittedly, that’s purely aesthetic anyway.
Practical Performance
With pixel-style graphics, Cattails: Wildwood Story has that retro feel furthered by a tile-based top-down navigation. You don’t see that design choice often these days, exploring a grid one section at a time. But I’m a fan. It makes it easy to navigate my map and works effortlessly for the mechanics of assigning squads and claiming control of areas.
Some of the music is more jazzy than I prefer, but I like some of it a lot. Getting to purchase “music discs” to play in my character’s home was maybe my favourite of the several collections to complete. The controls skew toward the modern, with heavy bumpers and the right joystick/d-pad use, but it feels pretty intuitive. Your inventory is completely independent, while every other menu and setting screen share access in a pretty large carousel.
Conclusion
Cattails: Wildwood Story is one of the greatest community sims I’ve ever seen. If you come at it hoping for farming, you won’t find much there but a small plot of land for reproducing plants you find in the wild. Other than that expectation, I can’t think of a reason to be disappointed with this experience. There’s so much to do, various difficulty settings, huge collections to complete, and several strategies for advancing. Cattails: Wildwood Story has been crafted with lots of care. Fight and forage your way to a purr-fect village!
Final Verdict: Two Thumbs Up