Graham said he wanted someone to write about Little Kitty, Big City, asked if I liked cats, at which point my soul was possessed by some kind of deep animus. “I really like cats, I just hate the internet UWU nonsense about cats,” I said. “God it’s awful, I can’t stand it, Jesus Christ it’s just an empty and terrible way to talk about cats, cats don’t deserve to be the internet animal-” at which point Graham managed to interrupt and said I was exactly the person who should write about Little Kitty, Big City.
I promise, I approached Little Kitty, Big City with an open heart, because I do really like cats. But given my aversion to their babification by the internet, it may be surprising that my chief complaint about Little Kitty, Big City is that the hats in it are largely not cute enough. This is a bold claim, because there are more than 40 to collect.
Little Kitty, Big City is a gentle open world adventure about a cat (you) falling from your perch on the window a high rise flat, whereupon you must explore the unidentified Japanese city, and seek out and eat fish to gain enough strength to climb all the way home again. The fish might be in the kitchen of a rooftop flat, ready to be cooked, or on the rod of a local fisherman down by the river, but they are better off in your fuzzy belly. You can meet many other animals on your travels, and find many a secret whimsical task (collect rubber ducks and put them in the pond) or hidden achievement (walk over wet concrete) on the way. Making your way back home is quite a relaxed affair, and you can spend your time meandering.
I do have complaints beyond the hats. Little Kitty, Big City is a kind of janky game. The first time I played it I got a few minutes in before everything suddenly became stuck in super slow-motion. I tried carrying on, because it was quite funny, but it was hard to get anything done. One quest, where one must find some lost tennis balls, saw a tennis ball roll into an inaccessible corner of a balcony, and I had to forcefully clip the kitty into a tiny gap to try and warp it back to where it was supposed to be. The jumping is hard to control with precision, which a) does not scream elegant cat and b) is annoying when that is the main way you traverse the world. I think Little Kitty, Big City would have been given less leeway in this regard if it was about a giant centipede, or something.
I realise this is a bit, “Oh yeah? But what if things were entirely different? Then they wouldn’t be the same!” People like the game because it is about a cat: it is about a cat so people like it. That doesn’t really matter. It’s a nice cat. You get cat emotes like Big Stretch. Can’t massively complain about that, can you? Ah, well. Nevertheless. The hats.
You find some hats hidden around the map, but largely you buy them from an entrepreneurial Crow, who operates a number of gacha machines. The main currency in the game are shiny bits like lost keys, bottle tops, buttons, and so on, but the only thing you can spend them on are the hats, and they’re only a fiver – sometimes more, for some of the more exclusive ones like the axolotl, so you collect a lot. But it is my considered opinion that most of them reduce the charisma of the titular diminutive feline, who is otherwise very charismatic. See those luminous green eyes, the large and well-shaped ears. What a good cat.
I like the smaller hats like the sushi, gingko leaf, or butterfly, which are perched rakishly on the cat’s head as if t’were ladies day at Ascot and the cat had chosen a restrained fascinator rather than a huge net hat. A+ for those. But so many of the other hats are foam monstrosities that turn the cat into a large pear or a melon or similar, but they make the cat look wrong and less charming because they always cover the cat’s ears. This renders the cat an un-cat, an unheimlich creature that my brain cannot easily parse as a cat. I saw a Tweet that showed the cat wearing an apple hat, captioned with, like, “What else do you need to convince you?” but the apple hat is a very uncharming hat on the cat! I would need more!
There are several hats that have holes cut out for the ears, and I approve of these – particularly the witch hat. I also like the animal ones that include ears, because then the cat has ears and it’s sort of okay. But the others? They don’t flatter our protagonist. And I worry that they would be uncomfortable and pin their ears to their head.
The fact that I have written nearly a thousand words explaining this game and why I think the cat deserves cuterer hats is evidence, I think, of how charming the game is, despite some jank and frustration. Like, there’s a bit where you go and rescue a bunch of ducklings who have got into adorable scrapes, and until you get them all home they follow you round and sometimes fall on their faces because they’re not so good at fast waddling. The internet animal has successfully melted me, and I will forgive the fact that in Little Kitty, Big City you don’t run, you have zoomies.
Disclosure: the writer on Little Kitty Big City is Philippa Warr, who used to work here.