Do you ever feel like a piece of toast, riding a cat, rotating in the air? No? Luckily, if you've never had this experience, you can try CATO: Buttered Cat, a game that combines both cat and toast to create a kind of perpetual motion machine. The laws of physics dictate that cats land right-side up, and toast lands right-side down so what happens when you mash them both together?
This is a clever puzzle platformer in which you control both cat and toast as you make your way through a whopping 140 main levels and an array of side levels, boss battles, and mini-games. Cat can run and trigger specific switches, while Toast can fling itself around, perform wall jumps, and insert itself into (you guessed it) toasters to shoot across long distances. Combined, Cat and Toast can rotate at high speed and take off into the air, a beautifully, buttery sight to behold.
It takes a few tries to master the different controls of Cat and Toast. The puzzles start simple - Cat needs to sit on one switch, Toast needs to climb up to a specific ledge, that kind of thing - but it gets more complicated, especially when requiring precise timing gets thrown into the mix. At times it can feel like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time. The more time is involved in the puzzles, the trickier it becomes. Press a switch as Cat before you're ready to launch yourself as Toast and it can spell disaster.
If you find yourself stuck, CATO has a great hint system that's not too involved. Choosing a hint in the menu will show you the next location for Cat and Toast. It doesn't hold your hand through the puzzle, it just signposts you to think about the direction you need to take next. I like this as a compromise because there's still an element of puzzling involved. If that's not enough, you can skip entire levels if you wait around for a minute, but then you're denying yourself the satisfaction of working it out. Still, it's nice to have if you get really stuck on a particular level, and I did get stuck a couple of times. One in particular gave me trouble, and it was useful to be able to call it quits and keep the flow going.
A highlight for me when playing CATO was the fluidity of the movement. It's an absolute joy to soar through the air as both Cat and Toast combined, something I found myself looking forward to at the end of every level. It has some fun platforming moments that feel intuitive and carefree, almost easy.
I say almost, because countering the easy, breezy nature of the plaforming are the puzzles themselves. It takes a fair bit of thought to get through some of the levels, and there were moments where I couldn't just push my way through it: I had to sit back and think strategically before launching into action, taking a few moments to work out what each switch does, and where I might need to place both of them to be able to proceed. This is what makes CATO a real thinky game. And as with all good puzzle games, you'll feel a great deal of satisfaction when the solution finally hits you.
Levels are short and fast-paced, and I stormed through the first 20 or so quite quickly. They flow nicely from one to the other, gradually introducing new mechanics at decent intervals so you don't get bored. At the end of the first world, you get to enjoy a level on rails where you need to jump and disassemble Cat-Toast at the right times, which acts as a nice brain break between the main puzzles.
There's a little hub world you can visit too, where you can switch up the Toast and Cat skins, access mini-games, and even take a short ride on a hamster wheel. Once you're done, you can access the level map and carry on where you left off. Occasionally, Toast and Cat will have a little conversation. It's mostly Toast talking, with a meow response from Cat, but still. The writing is funny and charming, and slots in nicely with the bonkers concept of the game itself.
The combination of ultra-fun platforming and tricky puzzles makes CATO a real must-play for me. It strikes just the right balance between intuition and careful thought. Opposites, but somehow working together to create something unexpectedly wonderful. Just like cats landing right side up and toast landing right side down: a weird combo, but somehow, it just works. And it works brilliantly.
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