Ship’s Cat – PS5 Review

Ship’s Cat comes to us from solo dev Daniel Caddy and self-published by him too as Caddy Computing, as opposed to one of the usual suspects like Silesia for example. The back of the fag packet description is Stray on a cruise liner. Just a bit more silly.

You play as an unnamed cat who’s been nominated as chief pest control operative on the atomic powered SS Tritium. What’s all the more remarkable is yer man Daniel has done this largely as a solo effort outside of gametesting by his friends.

All the assets are from various external model repositories such as turbosquid or the unreal engine libraries. This is illustrated somewhat by the main cat model, resembling this reviewer’s own foundling Ichiro.

As the endgame credits state, “the nice smooth walking and running animations were made by the person that made the cat. All the not so nice animations were made by me.” So refreshing honesty there. This honesty continues later for reasons that will become clear.

The ship is very well realised and remarkably coherent given the number of disparate assets in use. You start below decks and are welcomed warmly by the ships staff, though they’re quick to throw shade on the previous mouser. After a few tutorial areas introducing movement, you’re shown combat.

Such as it is anyway. At the outset, you attack mice with which dispatches the unusually large mice with a couple of taps. To be honest, we think they’re big enough to be rats, especially since rats are more usually the traditional shipborne pests of popular lore.

What you’ll be immediately struck by is how much the bowels of the ship look true to what you’ve experienced if you’ve ever been on a cruise or even a cross-channel ferry. The quality of the assets is very high and lends to a realistic sense of place.

At the outset you’re looking for isolated rats around the place and everything is fairly prosaic, if a bit janky. You see, the third party models don’t quite mesh, particularly the part where you’re negotiating a swimming pool slide, or swimming in the pool itself. It doesn’t matter that much, but Mr Caddy’s admission of the other animation being a bit iffy holds true.

Running around in the on-ship shopping mall is fun, especially the amusing chatter from the NPCs and the fact that the shopkeepers greet you with affection and in one case, scritches. No Dreamies though.

Yes, things generally get a bit more silly in the second half, notwithstanding the disco dancing set piece early on. It brought to mind Goat Simulator a little bit. Things get even more unhinged in the second half, as we mentioned, when you’re seeing off radioactive rats and trying to stop them taking over the ship.

Initially you’ll go toe to toe with the mice and rats, but once they gain strength in numbers, you’ll be reduced to evasion lest you get destroyed by them. You’re given access to a ground pound after a while, but that adds a new set of complications. The problem is that the ground pound can lead to you clipping through to the deck below and having to retrace your steps.

In our communications with the dev, he thanked us for the heads up, confirming that a patch has been submitted to Sony remedying the clipping through the floor, and on occasion the entire ship, as well as reproducible crash bug we were only able to resolve by way of a console restart, we suspect a stack overflow or similar. So while there’s bugs aplenty, they aren’t being ignored.

At the time of writing, one trophy had yet to pop despite our probably having fulfilled the conditions, but we don’t mind a replay once the patch hits as a complete playthrough is no more than a couple of hours. Given we’ve already played through Ship’s Cat, we’ll no doubt tear through it if we need to.

A few scripting issues meant we had to replay a few sections repeatedly until they triggered, but it was no huge issue. The clipping issue reared its head a few times too, but it wasn’t particularly game breaking.

In conclusion, Ship’s Cat is a knowingly daft romp in which you’re running around dispatching rats as you might expect in the first half, but the second is something quite different. Very silly and often funny, this is recommended. The bugs are unfortunate, but they’ll be resolved soon enough.