#scram kitty

Scram Kitty marks a hugely successful first year on sale with new player abilities and enhancements!

Dakko Dakko’s critical hit receives free ‘twin-stick’ update on Wii U, PS4 and PS Vita!

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but they don’t say any such thing about cats and so to mark a year since the game’s debut, Dakko Dakko is giving their hit shoot-em-up Scram Kitty a revolutionary update!

Scram Kitty burst onto the Wii U eShop to high praise last year, with Eurogamer describing the…

[song - The Beatles - Leave My Kitten Alone]

Now we're talking.

Scram Kitty is a brand new idea, and it works beautifully. It's probably best to describe it as a top-down dungeon crawler with precision-based controls. You stick to walls, rolling and jumping through twisting corridors and over abstract moving machinery, shooting enemies and activating switches. At times it's Zelda. At others, Loaded or Kuru Kuru Kururin. It's impossible to really know what it is unless you've played at least a few levels of it.

It ends up feeling like something from the mid-nineties, back when totally new game ideas were still pretty common. Some ideas bring back memories of Doom or Sonic the Hedgehog or Mario 64, even though the well considered blend of these ideas feels totally unique and logically designed. Its only real drawback is that it's so hard to get your head around what it is, and how you're supposed to play it, but that's half the fun. You're always learning about your movement, and ways to get around quicker and safer. Always trying to find shortcuts around mazes, and the best opportunities to attack enemies.

Progression through the game is tied to challenges in each level. Completing a specific amount of challenges will unlock new levels, but you don't have to complete every challenge to finish the basic game. So whether you enjoy racing after the Scardey cats, fighting the Black cats' Mouse Commander bosses or searching for all the Lucky cats' pennies, you rarely feel like you're being forced to play the game in a way you don't enjoy.

The levels themselves have more substance than those you'd find in a typical dungeon crawler. You don't just find the solution to a puzzle and go to the next section. You learn entire levels and discover the mutliple uses for every surface. Much like Umihara Kawase, Scram Kitty doesn't tell the player much, but rather, has them discover things through experimentation and practice. It's a technical game, but one that hides its depth behind simple shooting and speedy platforming. It's nice that Scram Kitty is a new IP, and it's exciting to welcome something like this coming out of nowhere, but there's tons of potential to these mechanics. I'd enthusiastically welcome a sequel.