The Purring Quest (2015)

A short game with a lot of heart and a very clean art style, The Purring Quest cats casts you as an agile feline returning an item to their owner in a perilous journey through five sections of a town. Each environment is graphically distinct and has its own small variances in gameplay. Much of the game involves running, and then either jumping a distance or jumping up high, and hoping you don’t miss your landing. It’s not terribly difficult, and it controls pretty well, but there’s enough of a challenge to make a few sections tough to get through, and the checkpoints are placed perfectly so as to make clearing one satisfying.

As a cat, you of course have nine lives. And, I believe, you also have unlimited continues. The 200 fishbone collectibles per level, and your fellow felines that require rescuing (one per level) ensure you’ve discovered how to get around all the slightly hidden and more vertical areas, and neither are too troublesome to collect. You can always return to the level after finishing and collect what you’ve missed, but it may be easier to just get them all in one go.

I do wish the climbing was more cat-like (it looks like a person scaling a building to me), and it’s sometimes difficult to know what is or isn’t a traversable surface when jumping, which is a rather important thing to know in a game like this. There are enemies that could have had better “tells” before they turn around, instead of immediately switching their sprite direction, hitboxes in general could probably have been better communicated, and the second area’s boss fight is far too dependent on janky physics. However, for as tiny as the development team is, I still think they did an excellent job.

As a last cautionary comment, near the end of the game there’s a musical mini-game that, if you can’t pass it, the developers (who have excellent communication on Steam) have been offering to pass it for you and return your updated save file. On a controller, it was definitely tough. There’s an occasional two-note “chord” requiring two buttons to be held at once, and all four buttons you need are typically found under your right thumb (the A/B/X/Y buttons). I opted to play that section on the keyboard after a few tries, and was then able to make it through with zero mistakes (disclaimer: I can play a bit of piano). I otherwise actually quite liked that section though, and the game’s soundtrack in general. It’s simple, and it may get annoying if you’re failing part of a level multiple times, but it’s a nice gentle piano-focused sort of thing.

The Purring Quest had been on my wishlist for nearly a year when I finally decided I couldn’t pass it up as one of my five selections for $2.99 from Bundle Stars’s Dollar Dash 5 this past October. Cats are great creatures, and celebrated nicely here by a small team of developers that obviously care about them; each of the cats in the game feels likely to have been based on a real life cat! I don’t think the game has all the polish and testing that it could, but I can still recommend it if you thought you might be interested in it based on the title alone.

Here’s two other reviews I found of The Purring Quest on BLAEO – one from lmxn, and one from Saph! :) [edit] And a critical one from malabagaa! [/edit]