Catlateral Damage

(Hey, remember last post when I said I have a queue now? Guess who forgot to actually set up the publish dates for it! Anyway, stuff has been set up and now we're good to go while I focus a bit on real life stuff!)

Catlateral Damage is a first-person, cat simulator created by Manekoware, where in the whole point is destruction. With an average stated playtime of just half an hour, and a suitably jaunty tune to go along with it, you get the incredible hounor of being a cat. The controls are pretty much the same as every other first-person game I've played on this list so far and that includes the ten minutes of cursing my past self for not buying that mouse already cause trying to be a cat swiping at things on high shelves with a touch pad control is kind of awkward. Nonetheless, I got sucked into this game for almost Six Hours in one playthrough.

You know the 'father, I crave violence' cat meme? That's this game, just, you actually get the violence. You also get to choose which cat you want to be and what envirnments you want to wreak havoc in. I tended to stay in the first choice given house that you went through the tutorial in and went in as each of the four cats we get as the starter ones mostly cause I love knocking books off shelves SO MUCH. Truly the most cathartic thing I have ever done and I will be telling my therapist about that.

And just, you make a mess.

You just, get to be a cat making a mess.

There's books and figures and video games. If you're persistant enough you can knock a TV off it's stand and watch plants fall to the floor. Spill wine and push things out of cupboards and shelves. It's so simple. But the sheer Chaos of it all.

Now, I'm not the tidiest of people in the world, my brother likes to joke that I have the organizational skills of someone born after 2000, and I've lived with cats for years. Maybe my family got lucky that none of our cats ever were this distructive but I've never actually had a staredown with a housecat trying to knock something off a shelf. There's been plenty of scratched up couch arms and chairs and the very loud protests to being kept inside or put in a carrier but never anything this level of violent. But video games aren't real life and if I want to play as a bored housecat doing their absolute best to knock 200 things on the floor and completely ruin my owner's house, then dear god, I'm gonna do it.

Within the game there are two modes you can choose to play in. The Sandbox (Ha) where in it's just a free for all and you have no set time limit but still get to destroy everything with the added bonus of fun side objectives that pop up. But dear lord I have never managed to catch that challenge mouse and I have tried at least five times already. And the laser pointer was so obscenely difficult to even find, let alone catch with my very basic understanding of controls. There's also the Objectives mode! There you get a set time limit and a set amount of objects to knock over, still with the fun side challenges so everythigs more fast paced and goal oriented within the given chaos.

I don't know if I can really describe the absolute frenzy this game caused that managed to take over a whole afternoon on one of my scarce days off. It's just, being allowed that amount of sheer destructive energy was Amazing and something I need to incorporate more into my life. Especially after all the existential nightmare games I've stumbled into in this List, being able to just knock things over and make a mess and sleep in a box was the Best.

Okay, that's enough of me rambling about cats. Have a nice night and happy dreams.