Speak to any cat owner, and they’ll inform you that no product of food is safe if left vulnerable. Speak to any cat owner, and they’ll hail the mystifying enjoyments of empty cardboard boxes. Speak to any cat owner, and they’ll worry their love for their self-cleaning animals however desire they’d stop bringing home dead birds as “presents”. Speak to Matt Wood, video game director of Little Kitty, Big City and self-proclaimed “cat father”, and he’ll inform you all of the above was motivation for his upcoming open-world experience video game.
“I’ve had cats the majority of my life, I like cats. It was actually crucial to me to make the video game feel authentic,” says Wood. “I desired individuals who recognized with cats to seem like they were playing as a cat. It’s extremely simple to take the path of: here’s an avatar that appears like a cat. To me, I wished to feel like I was playing as a cat.”
Paws for idea
Besides all of its cuteness – more of which we’ll discuss even more down the page – among Little Kitty, Big City’s most charming functions is its sensible animations. Be it squeezing through tight areas, playfully chasing your tail, toppling wastebasket, catching glossy things, or callously overturning plant pots to the ground from height (while appearing to provide definitely no f*cks in doing so), every twitchy, irregular motion of the video game’s black tabby cat lead character is rendered with precise care.
Against its lively cartoon-like world, and the lead character’s huge green shimmering eyes that shine like diamonds in the sun, the accuracy with which Wood and his group have actually articulated their source product is remarkable. Wood includes: “We’ve attempted to present a great deal of cat-isms, and things that cats would naturally do. We desire individuals to see it and resemble, hello, my cat does that! I dunno, in some cases having a cat seems like you remain in this little club, and we wish to make certain that individuals feel that exact same method about the character.”
“I’m continuously sending out Micah, my animator, TikToks, YouTube videos, and even videos of my own cats, simply little things occasionally, like: this is so cool, we have actually gotta put this in the video game! But there’s just a lot of it we can in fact put in. It’s amusing since I’ve had cats my entire life, I sign up for all the cat channels, and for whatever factors, cats are still so remarkable. The things they do, how awkward they can be. You understand, I do not actually understand what it has to do with them. I think I’m simply actually into cats.”
In the brief demonstration section I dipped into Summer Game Fest 2023, I invested a long time stalking bluebirds, taking their plumes and trading them with a raccoon for shinies that I owed to a talking crow. I was completely captivated by the video game’s amusing and amusing story, and chuckled aloud after getting on an innocent passer-by, prior to taking their phone and getting ferreted out a hectic street. I broke a lot of clay plant pots, scavenged for goodies in wastebasket, concealed in a handful of cardboard boxes, and nuzzled at the ankles of people in order to be revealed love. Ultimately, I lived the life of a cat. It was purrfect.
Through all of this, there’s a melancholic, slapstick quality to Little Kitty, Big City that makes certain to attract cat enthusiasts and non-cat enthusiasts alike. It’s fitting that it’s billed as an open-world sandbox video game provided the source product – a quip that isn’t lost on Wood: “we actually are leaning into the sandbox pun” – and it’s even drawn contrasts with Untitled Goose Game and Goat Simulator with its fondness for wonton hijinx motivated by man’s least faithful friend.
“It’s fantastic to be compared to other fantastic video games,” says Wood. “The reality though is that there actually aren’t lots of cat video games like this. When I began the video game, I didn’t begin making this kind of video game, I just wished to make a video game with a cat. I asked myself what that appeared like. And then I decreased the roadway of thinking about the sorts of things that would be intriguing, that’d let me lean into the reality that we have a cat who’s checking out, satisfying characters and doing amusing cat things. In doing that, the video game might most likely be compared to a variety of various video games – there’s questing, discussion, navigation, light platforming, turmoil.”
Of course, the rowdy habits of Little Kitty, Big City’s star is more quickly forgiven by virtue of its cuteness. The Little Kitty lead character is typically charming, not least when putting on the video game’s selection of expensive head-wear. During the section I played, I had the ability to accumulate 3 hats – a frog hat, a bear hat, and a bunny ears hat – each of which was cuter than the last.
Wood includes: “We have around 40 hats, and we have actually needed to cut loads on top of that. Hats was among the important things that early seemed like an apparent thing you might carry out in the video game. The concern for me was: how important are they to the gameplay? And the more we playtested, and the more we sat with the concept, we recognized that they might simply be hats. They do not require to be anything more than remarkable and charming hats. That’s all they require to be, and we like them. We hope gamers do too.”
