Preview: I Am Cat
Virtual Reality lets you do a lot of things, and now I Am Cat allows you to become a cat and terrorise your owner like any normal cat does. I have now experienced being a cat and running, jumping, climbing, jumping and causing mayhem, but was it fun?
Release Date: May 23rd 2024
Developer: NEW FOLDER GAMES
Publisher: NEW FOLDER GAMES
Price: £10.99
Reviewed On: Meta Quest *
* Access Provided For Preview *
In the early access version that is currently available you get a sandbox house environment for you to move about however you please, but only in ways possible by a cat. As previously mentioned you can run, jump and climb around, and get creative on how you make it around the house.
What makes this stand out is the team have taken the approach of making a locomotion system using your arms like you are a cat. With moving your arms in a set motion moving your across the floor, hitting both your paws on the floor making you jump, doing the movement locomotion up a wall making you climb and grip getting your claws out. Giving you the feeling of being cat while playing, which given the games name was going to be important.
Don’t worry there is a short tutorial with videos on the TV’s showing you the exact movements you have do for each method, and by the end of this the movement will feel like second nature as its been designed and implemented so well.
One thing you have as a cat that they don’t in real-life is a smart watch. This is where a neighborhood cat will contact you and set you missions to prove your prowess as the new cat on the block. These will have you playing with toys, showing off your agility, doing something kind and causing general mayhem in the sandbox house they have created. With you being set tasks like finding and returning the fish to the tank, chasing your mouse toys around downstairs and off course a cats favorite things to do… pushing things off shelves or anything with a edge and scratching up anything fabric.
Now it’s not all plain sailing, as your human will be in the house and if she catches you breaking items she will come after you with a frying pan – yes, she is that evil. If she hits you it will knock you out, but you just continue where you left off before being hit, there is no resetting of your missions or anything. However, all is fair in love and war, if she is chasing you and you get above her with something to knock off the shelves you can knock her out and stop the chase. This is not the only way to stop her chasing you though, if you can escape her for long enough she will give up and go back to her day watching cats on TV and pottering about downstairs.
With this being a sandbox play area you can do everything outside of the actual missions given to you at any point. So, if you just want to go in and misbehave and break things you can. Then if you have made too much of a mess, just go to your bed and sleep and the house will reset. However, this has sometimes caused the game to bug for me, where I had to delete my save and start again – as even though I was completing missions after a sleep it was not giving me XP, so the next set of missions didn’t start. But, the game is still in Early Access, so these sort of bugs can be ironed out.
The team at New Folder Games have also informed the game will continue to evolve with more content, new locations, a story-line, more challenging missions, and compelling characters being added over time.
From my time playing the Early Access release this game has been fun to jump into and cause some mayhem as a cat – especially with how well the locomotion system has been implemented. With the missions allowing you to get a good taste of what it is like being a cat, doing all the good, bad and ugly things a cat does. I am interested in seeing where the developers take it with the mentioned updates to flesh the title out, but this could become a game that is so different and special in a way that is only possible with Virtual Reality.