#falcon development

Yep, that’s what it is. It’s also the finale of my “cat game” review series. The husband and wife development team did not mention Stardew Valley in their Kickstarter pitch, but it’s clear to me that that breakout farming/life sim (released 14 months before Cattails’ Kickstarter commenced) was the chief inspiration. The art style, the menus, many of the mechanics, and just the vibe are very similar. This isn’t a bad thing as it’s a great template to work from and applying the theme of cats is also a winner.

Of course cats don’t farm, so replace that with hunting. You’ve still got foraging, cave mining with combat, and relationships to manage in a living world with day/night and seasonal cycles. Add in a clan dynamic with territory control, gang warfare, and diplomacy and you’ve got Cattails!

The game is very open-ended. Your main goal is to collect specific rare prey animals, bugs, fish, etc. to activate the mystical pillars (very much like the community centre collection tasks in SV) that will restore the cats’ patron deity. But along the way there’s lots of things to keep busy with: battling, building friendships, bolstering your skill trees, keeping your larder stocked, tackling the daily sidequest board, or just exploring the huge world. Every season (10 days each) ends with a festival where the three clans gather to play minigames.

Roaming around pouncing on stuff, filling my cat pockets(?) with junk to sell, and learning the lay of the land... I found the basic loop satisfying. At a certain point I found I had to wait two whole seasons so I could purchase the last rare drop from the winter festival, so I even engaged with the relationship mechanics to fill time, which I usually avoid in games like this; I’m a very antisocial neighbour in Animal Crossing or Stardew. It doesn’t take too long to get through the critical stuff, but there’s lots of possibility. You can work on romancing earlier and even have kittens, you can leave your colony to join one of the other two or even start your own in the postgame.