Update One Hundred and Fifty-Four: 18 April 2018
Hustle Cat
49 hours, 12 of 12 achievements
6/10
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
A cute indie VN with good ideas and concepts that unfortunately are hindered by a clunky system and clunky writing. Though, I will say, in the case of ‘A VN where you date people cursed to turn into animals’, I liked Hustle Cat more than Animal Lover.
In Hustle Cat, you play a young Millennial who is desperate to find a job - relatable - and is so desperate that when they come upon a strange cafe with a ‘HELP WANTED’ sign in the window, they accept the job without investigating too hard about it. They end up discovering the hard way that everyone who works at this cafe is cursed - to turn into a cat when they try to leave. You can pick your gender (female, male, non-binary) and there’s four male and two female routes to persue.
The main touchstone of my feelings about this VN is that it’s just not enough. Nothing is enough. The routes are there, but it’s not enough. There’s some worldbuilding, but you don’t see enough for it to super matter. In one route, and only one route, you see why one of the characters is cursed. For everyone else, they just kind of… are, and it doesn’t super matter to them. There’s some clever writing, and some interesting choices, but on the whole it’s just… I need more, and I didn’t get it.
It didn’t help that this is one of the worst-optimized VNs I’ve played - everything is clunky and slow. I don’t think this was made in Ren’Py - if it is, I’d be surprised - I think this was made in Unity because the bog-standard ‘loading’ screen is the same. Yes, I encountered loading screens in this VN. Oftentimes it would take a few seconds for sprites to load in, too - some of whom I had to wait for their expressions to pop in after staring at creepy, blank faces. There weren’t a lot of options, and skip text worked abysmally - if you alt+tabbed away from the game it would stop, and it didn’t detect whether you read the text or not. It also skipped so… slowly… having to wait for transitions and loading times.
Oh, boy, that’s two paragraphs of just straight up complaints - but I still rated this game on the positive side. I think despite these flaws there IS some cute things here, and while I’m not putting it on my VN list, I think it’s a promising first VN for this team. I just hope they come out with a better-structured, better-optimized VN next time.
Next up: RNGesus, what shall I play?
See you soon!
I was looking forward reading your review for Hustle Cat but it’s a pity that those negative things (which are all true and I fully agree with you) matter more to you than it’s cuteness because somehow I totally fell for the characters and loved it. Sadly I can’t remember Graves’ route so I also forgot his reason why he cursed them in the first place (screw you bad memory!) but I still remember me thinking while playing before knowing his route that he maybe did it in advance to help them but they just gave up instead of trying to figure it out… Until Avery did it for them. But yeah, it would have helped if the routes were longer and more time to explain - like you said it wasn’t enough. Nevertheless I’m still in love with Landry =3=
There were moments I really liked - I actually really liked Graves’ route a lot, and I liked Finley, and Mason, and Landry (Reese and Hayes I could leave). I really liked watching everyone discover their magic, esp. Finley’s was really creative and clever.
I just felt those moments were just… moments, rather than a sustained, complete thing. I was held back by these other problems, and overarching story structural problems, from really being able to fall in love with these cursed cats.
I’m glad you liked it - and I definitely can see why.
huuh I don’t think I had the loading issues you had, but yeah the skipping was annoyingly slow!
As for your next game RIP don’t even bother with that dev’s atrocious games
Yeahhhhh, I got this game (and a few others) in a bundle, and when I looked it up on vndb it was sitting at a solid ‘3’ and I thought ‘ohhhhh buoy……’
But! Sometimes playing bad things on purpose can be fun, and worse comes to worse (if I can sit through it) It’ll be a quick 100%
noooo they have annoying minigames that interrupt the pace of the narrative and non-existent epilogues, have fun with it :P
Are you going to sink your heart and soul into this next game? Sorry couldn’t resist ^.^
I’ve looked it up already on VNDB and since its standing is ‘bad’, probably not! But sometimes I like watching trainwrecks. c;