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Speak to any cat owner, and they'll tell you that no item of food is safe if left unguarded. Speak to any cat owner, and they'll hail the mystifying pleasures of empty cardboard boxes. Speak to any cat owner, and they'll stress their love for their self-cleaning pets but wish they'd stop bringing home dead birds as "presents". Speak to Matt Wood, game director of Little Kitty, Big City and self-proclaimed "cat dad", and he'll tell you all of the above was inspiration for his upcoming open-world adventure game.
"I've had cats most of my life, I love cats. It was really important to me to make the game feel genuine," says Wood. "I wanted people who were familiar with cats to feel like they were playing as a cat. It's very easy to take the route of: here's an avatar that looks like a cat. To me, I wanted to feel like I was playing as a cat."
Paws for thought
Besides all of its cuteness – more of which we'll speak about further down the page – one of Little Kitty, Big City's most endearing features is its realistic animations. Be it squeezing through tight spaces, playfully chasing your tail, tipping over trash cans, pouncing on shiny objects, or callously knocking over plant pots to the ground from height (while appearing to give absolutely zero f*cks in doing so), every twitchy, erratic movement of the game's black tabby cat protagonist is rendered with meticulous care.
Against its vibrant cartoon-like world, and the protagonist's massive green sparkling eyes that shine like diamonds in the sun, the preciseness with which Wood and his team have articulated their source material is impressive. Wood adds: "We've tried to introduce a lot of cat-isms, and things that cats would naturally do. We want people to see it and be like, hey, my cat does that! I dunno, sometimes having a cat feels like you're in this little club, and we want to make sure that people feel that same way about the character."
"I'm constantly sending Micah, my animator, TikToks, YouTube videos, or even videos of my own cats, just little things here and there, like: this is so cool, we've gotta put this in the game! But there's only so much of it we can actually put in. It's funny because I've had cats my whole life, I subscribe to all the cat channels, and for whatever reasons, cats are still just so fascinating. The stuff they do, how clumsy they can be. You know, I don't really know what it is about them. I guess I'm just really into cats."
In the short demo segment I played at Summer Game Fest 2023, I spent some time stalking bluebirds, stealing their feathers and trading them with a raccoon for shinies that I owed to a talking crow. I was thoroughly entertained by the game's humorous and witty narrative, and laughed out loud after jumping on an innocent passer-by, before stealing their phone and getting chased down a busy street. I broke a lot of clay plant pots, scavenged for goodies in trash cans, hid in a handful of cardboard boxes, and nuzzled at the ankles of human beings in order to be shown affection. Ultimately, I lived the life of a cat. It was purrfect.
Through all of this, there's a melancholic, slapstick quality to Little Kitty, Big City that's sure to appeal to cat lovers and non-cat lovers alike. It's fitting that it's billed as an open-world sandbox game given the source material – a quip that isn't lost on Wood: "we really are leaning into the sandbox pun" – and it's even drawn comparisons with Untitled Goose Game and Goat Simulator with its penchant for wonton hijinx inspired by man's least loyal friend.
"It's great to be compared to other great games," says Wood. "The reality though is that there really aren't many cat games like this. When I started the game, I didn't start out making this type of game, I simply wanted to make a game with a cat. I asked myself what that looked like. And then I went down the road of considering the sorts of things that would be interesting, that'd let me lean into the fact that we have a cat who's exploring, meeting characters and doing funny cat things. In doing that, the game could probably be compared to a number of different games – there's questing, dialogue, navigation, light platforming, chaos."
Of course, the unruly behavior of Little Kitty, Big City's star is more easily forgiven by virtue of its cuteness. The Little Kitty protagonist is often adorable, not least when donning the game's array of fancy head-wear. During the segment I played, I was able to accrue three hats – a frog hat, a bear hat, and a rabbit ears hat – each of which was cuter than the last.
Wood adds: "We have around 40 hats, and we've had to cut loads on top of that. Hats were one of the things that early felt like an obvious thing you could do in the game. The question for me was: how integral are they to the gameplay? And the more we playtested, and the more we sat with the idea, we realized that they could just be hats. They don't need to be anything more than awesome and cute hats. That's all they need to be, and we love them. We hope players do too."
At this point, I've barely scratched the surface of Little Kitty, Big City's grand tale (tail) of exploration, but it's now sunk its paws into me. Recently, my family and I have been weighing up the pros and cons of adopting a pet cat in real life – perhaps I'll put us all to the test when Little Kitty, Big City rolls out next year on PC via Steam, Xbox One, PS4, and the Nintendo Switch.
