Cats Around Us: Giant Cat – PS5 Review

Cats Around Us: Giant Cat is the latest cat-em-up from our pals at Silesia Games. The dev is noobzilla, they of the Cats and Seek subset. The price on the PSN store is £2.49, but even for one of Silesia’s games, this is slim pickings.

You first have a stage in which you have to find a bunch of cats and puzzle pieces. Twenty-five puzzle pieces are found throughout the first three levels, each of which acts as a barrier to the next. You see, to unlock the subsequent stages you need to solve the respective puzzles.

It breaks up the gameplay a little bit, but at the same time, we spent a disproportionate amount of time doing the puzzles, but not for the reason you might expect. You see, you can reset your puzzle with just one misplaced press of you’ll have undone your work. It’s a bit annoying to be honest.

Once you’ve completed a puzzle, the next stage will be available to play. The stages themselves are typical noobzilla fare with a story of sorts being depicted via a comic book. Think Kiki’s Delivery Service to some extent with the cute witch and her familiars. Just with tons of extra cats beyond the few in Miyazaki’s masterpiece.

We say tons, but as we said, slim pickings. We’ll forgo our usual pennies per cat ratio this time, but it’s low. The four stages only host just over two hundred cats cumulatively, which is more than a penny per cat. So even by Silesia’s previous, this is meagre.

You get some replay value with the time trial mode available, but that’s just repeating the same levels again, only without a hint function as you’d get in normal play.

So while trophy hunters will be done in less than an hour, even for one of these hidden cat games, we struggle to recommend Giant Cat if we’re honest. Yes, the comic book conceit is quite nicely done and the fact that you need to unlock levels by completing puzzles is a new addition but the paucity of cats is a bit of a factor in a hidden cat game.