Hidden Cats in Tokyo – PS5 Review

Hidden Cats in Tokyo is this month’s hidden cat game from our pals at Silesia Games. This time it’s coded by Brazilian dev Nukearts who have previous hidden cat game form with jaunts to Paris, London and Berlin amongst others.

If you ever played one of these sorts of games you’ll know what to expect. A series of scenes with hidden cats aplenty. There’s a little bit of animation at times too, typically when a vehicle with a cat comes past.

Across fifteen levels you’ll have to find a multitude of hidden felines and in an additional, slightly less welcome twist, a lot of humans too.

There’s a hackneyed plot and a load of exposition about time travelling and cats being turned into monsters. We skipped past it to be honest, but we guess if you’re into that sorta anime thing it could be your bag.

Practically it means you’ll spend your time exploring scenes across Tokyo in both the past and present. The initial street scene introduces a new twist on the mechanic, at least to us. When you find all the cats in a certain section, that part is coloured in. Then you’ve got a visual cue as to where to concentrate your efforts. The colouring in aspect is only utilised in the larger levels, though it could also have come in handy in the levels where you also have to find humans.

You also get an audio cue when a cat comes into view, so you can resort to slowly panning across the scenes and listening out for a meow. It saves having to resort to using the hint system anyway, which is crucial if you’re trying for a platinum. And let’s be honest, who’s playing this on PS5 that isn’t doing so?

The levels go from simply drawn through functional to occasionally exquisite, to the extent that we could make a case for getting one blown up and put on our wall to examine at our leisure. We mean look at it. Beautiful.

Each level has a cat counter as well as a number of extras to find, typically a cat accessory like a scratching post or something. You’ll also find real world cats, we suspect those of the devs. Heck, if we were a game developer we’d be finding ways to shoehorn our cats in, so we don’t blame them.

As well as the cats, you’ll also be tasked with finding a few humans per level. Usually no more than a dozen or so. However, a few levels require you to find the best part of a hundred extra people which gets old quickly. We appreciate that the devs want to show off their art and by getting you to find all these extra people they get to do so.

But when access to the next level is gated until you find every single one, you begin to lose the will to live. If we wanted to play Where’s Wally, we’d pinch our kid’s book. What you typically end up doing is comb the levels for the specific people you’re asked to find, but after a while you end up spamming groups of people in the hope you find one. It’s not much fun. It certainly stretches the hidden cats aspect rather.

As well as the humans and the superfluous storyline, you have a couple of minigames, though these aren’t too onerous and are just matter of timing. Then after a little longer than you’re typically going to be used to, you’ll have unlocked the platinum and can move on to the next low hanging fruit.

We enjoyed ourselves for the most part though, though we were glad that we did the levels with the extra humans at the first attempt, as we accidentally hit the hint button on one of them and feared we’d have to play it all over again.

In conclusion, Hidden Cats in Tokyo is another worthy addition to the pantheon of hidden cat games from Silesia, though we’ll be happy if there’s not so many hidden humans into the bargain next time. The art on display is well done and on occasion, beautiful so this is good. The plot is pretty nonsensical but at least you can skip past it without any real impediment.