Cat and Ghostly Road Review (PC Game, 2020)
Cat and Ghostly Road is a beautiful point-n-click adventure game available on PC. You play as a cat who has to save the spirit of its owner from a demon that stole it right out of his body. You cross through a painting into the spirit world where you interact with spirits, demons, and mythical creatures to solve puzzles and save your owner.
When I say Cat and Ghostly Road is a beautiful game, I mean it. Playing through this game took my breath away. I wanted to explore every inch of every stage not just to solve all the puzzles but to see what everything looked like. I was on the verge of tears when some locations were revealed just from the artistry of the game. It’s stunning to look at and so different from so many point-n-click adventure games.
The story is great, as well. The cat is so expressive with its wagging tail and glowing eyes. They get to interact with so many wonderful and terrifying creatures who all have a story to tell if you can figure out how to understand them. Foxes, cats, mushrooms, dragons, skeletons, demons, and goblins all hold secrets to help you save your owner. The environment slowly reveals why your owner incurred the wrath of the demon and what you will face to save him.
For most of the game, the puzzle design is fair and challenging. You have to find just the right order of operations, like putting together random feathers to create a feather duster to clean off an altar before you can safely leave a tribute to some spiritual being. They can take a little bit of time to find all the pieces—the beautiful art is easy to disguise objects in—but they mostly feel fair.
That changes near the end game. I feel there is one particular region of the game that is more frustrating than fun because it introduces a brand new puzzle mechanic never seen before or after. You fall asleep and ascend into this gorgeous spiritual plane as a butterfly. There is artwork connected to the zodiac and stars as far as the eye can see. Then you reach the end of the realm and you can’t interact with anything.
You go back and deal with the dreaded “lost in translation” issues (localization really changed the clues to one puzzle involving what the English translation calls a “werewolf”) before maybe stumbling on a solution by randomly clicking over 4 different realms until something happens. Even then, when I could finally interact with the puzzle element, I wound up brute forcing my way through a puzzle that could have had 479001600 possible answers.
It’s not actually that high—the puzzle pieces always stay in the same order, mercifully—but I didn’t know that on sight. This is a combination of introducing a brand new mechanic (the solution can be seen, but no other puzzle had a solution hidden in the background before) and issues of translation (I realized afterwards that one character’s clue also gave the answer, but was so disconnected from my understanding of the zodiac that it was useless until afterwards). It felt unfair, like an artificial difficultly added in at the final moments to delay the end of the game.
Despite that sequence, I had so much fun exploring Cat and Ghostly Road. It’s definitely one of my favorite point-n-click adventure games to come out in a long time. I recommend any fan of the genre check it out.
Cat and Ghostly Road is available on Steam for PC.
