Your cat roams the town but doesn’t have much more than a stilted animation, and the other characters around town are stationary, popping in and out as the day/night cycle demands. Initially the pixel art seems bright and cheerful enough, but not much is actually done with it, and as a result it doesn’t really do much beyond existing. The world of A Street Cat’s Tale also lacks personality. There’s “the bad boss cat”, the “stupid dog,” and “the cat-obsessed human,” as well as a half dozen other character-types (not characters), and that’s really all these is to these characters, in what is meant to be principally a game about forming social bonds with those around you to help survive. Characters have two or three lines of dialogue, which is barely enough to characterise them as broad caricatures, let alone create the kind of rich characterisation this game needed.
It’s a trail-and-breadcrumbs deal with results to follow a narrative that… really doesn’t go anywhere. You wander around town “talking” to cats and dogs, and sucking up to humans (who you won’t understand until you’ve obtained a certain “friendship” level with them, at which point you suddenly will). From there, you need to wander around town, digging through trashcans for leftovers and banana peels, and then either consuming those to keep your energy up, gifting them to the other denizens of the neighbourhood to improve your friendship levels with them, or exchanging them with a local alley cat for house upgrades. You do find a little cardboard box to sleep on, but it doesn’t take long for starvation to set in. The cat’s potentially saved after it is carted off to a vet, but you’re left on the streets to fend for yourself.
It’s a horrible, sad start to this game, as a kitten (your avatar) watches their mother get run over by a car and left for dead. A Street Cat’s Tale tries to make a cute and charming story of survival out of such circumstances… but unfortunately it comes off as all a little aimless in execution. Scavenging around for rubbish and often only able to eat by the good graces of humanity – the same species whose behaviour is the underlying cause of why most street cats are out there – no, it’s not a pleasant life.
It has to be a tough life to be a street cat.
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