Secret Paws – Cozy Offices : PS5 Review

Secret Paws – Cozy Offices is the latest from eastasiasoft, in this case a take on the hidden cat genre developed by Sagitta Studios aka Alexandre. Quite possibly a solo dev, but that’s all good.

As opposed to the usual isometric fixed view that you pan around, Secret Paws is a proper 3D environment that you can actually rotate around in increments of ninety degrees.

This does mean that the cats themselves are effectively the same 3D model scaled to fit and with colour swaps. It means that a little of the artistry we’d grown used from Silesia Games isn’t present. Though a black cat being a little void is very familiar to this reviewer and suddenly wondering why we’re seeing a pair of eyes staring back from what appears to be an empty bathmat.

What Sagitta has done well is to do two sets of levels spread around a couple of office hubs. The implementation is where it falls down a little. To get the levels populated, there’s only so many ways the cats can be hidden. So black cats can be hidden to blend in with a monitor for example. Or green cats blend in with the foliage of a pot plant.

What the dev gets a bit wrong is by being so desperate to meet a quota of a number of cats in a particular sub-level, it makes some of the cats, if not actually invisible, but as good as. One for example, we couldn’t see for the life of us, but upon using the hint function, 99% of the model was obscured and literally just the tips of its ears was visible.

Or in a repeated implementation, a cat is hidden in an archive box with a closed lid. It’d not be so bad if the box opened upon your clicking on it, but in this case, it stays resolutely hidden. The only clue you’d found one being the meow from the audio cue denoting you’d found another.

On the flipside, some are hidden inside a cup show up when you click on the beverage container. The behaviour is a little inconsistent anyway.

The office setting lends itself well to hiding more cats inside heating vents, cupboards and desk pedestals. Though that layout had changed to hotdesking well before we stopped going into the office on the regular. It works well in that regard anyway.

Ultimately the problem is that there’s only so many places you can secret a cat in an office environment, so you find the same patterns repeated over and over, like behind a picture frame. The rotation aspect makes it feel a little more fresh though, so that helps.

In conclusion, Secret Paws – Cozy Offices is a worthy entry to the hidden cat genre, with the unusual aspect of being rendered in three dimensions so you can rotate the view t see from different angles. Some cats are a bit too well hidden but as long as you’re not liberally abusing the hint function, you’ll be OK and not have to wait for the cooldown. The added bonus being an eastasiasoft joint is you get PS5 and PS4 into the bargain. It’s an easy platinum too, so get to it.