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Swing by the Xbox Store and you might be tempted by a game with a £2.49 price tag. You might be tempted by its cute cats too, or some combination of them both. But as Nans across the world will tell you, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. If you’re like us, you will have a prickly, wary sensation that this is a honey trap – some shovelware in kitten’s clothing.
Let us rest a reassuring hand on your shoulder and say ‘nae worries: this is one of the good ones’. Every rule has its exception, and Hidden Cats in New York is a fuzzy, cute exception.
This will be no surprise to players of Hidden Cats in London. Priced identically, it was the first in this particular series (there is another hidden cat series on the Xbox, confusingly) and it should be your next stop if you end up enjoying this edition. Because we would be happy if ‘Hidden Cats in’ games come out until the end of time. They’re such a wholesome, cheap way to spend two hours, and we always end up wanting more.
It’s such a simple concept that we wonder how we will fill a review by describing it. Imagine a Where’s Wally?, but cat-bombed. A large city scene of New York has been invaded by 200 cats, and you have to spot every last one. Here’s a cursor, here’s the picture, now get tapping.
The magic, the secret sauce, the catnip is the use of colour. The broad canvas in Hidden Cats in New York is black and white. It’s welcome as there’s clarity to black and white. You don’t end up thinking that a shadow is a black tabby: you can tell immediately and instinctively what is feline and what is false. But as you find cats, they get coloured in. Better still, find all the cats in a tenement and the entire building gets coloured in. Suddenly you have an important piece of information. You’re done here, you can move on. You’re not missing anything.
It’s such a simple idea, but so gloriously, wondrously perfect. The possibility-space for cats shrinks. You don’t have to worry too much about where the last 18 out of 200 cats are. There will be black-and-white hints across the tableau. And so you tap and you tap until every last one is found.
We will admit that this is not for everyone. You can’t call in air strikes or decapitate anyone with an axe. But if you like your thrills resolutely in first gear, and happen to enjoy some cat-spotting as well, then Hidden Cats in New York is your game.
Normal Mode is pure cat gold, without anything else to dilute the experience. But there’s also a Hard Mode which randomises the cats (superbly handled), adds in special cats that unlock bonus levels (cutely referencing famous New York IPs like King Kong and Spiderman), and lets you spot humans (yaaaaawn). It’s this last one that we are not convinced about: you need to match the human with a small-ish picture of them, and we found it to be a chore more than anything else. We don’t want to be given a shopping list to spot specific things: we just want to jab our cursor at anything with whiskers and a tail.
It might sound one-note and quick-to-complete and you would be absolutely right, so praise-be that there are bonus levels. There are five of them, with 100 to 50 cats for your delectation, and they riff on some Big Apple themes. You can explore a Ninja Cat sewer dwelling (no prizes for guessing what that’s referring to), plus a Natural History Museum and the subway, among others.
These episodes are less wide-ranging, and they also bring the game’s only major flaws. We are not sure why they break from the main game’s rulesets, because when they do, it’s generally not for the better.
Scenes don’t get coloured in as you go. That chef’s-kiss of a game mechanic is stripped out and we couldn’t tell you why. Perhaps it would make things too easy if it was there. But it means that the last few cats are a pain to spot. They could be flipping anywhere, and there’s no colouration to give you a helping hand.
Hints are limited to one per level. When you have bonus levels like the park, where two cats are nigh-on impossible to spot, having only two hints is an unnecessary limitation. We don’t see why there couldn’t have been a cooldown on that hint. That or force us to find cats on other levels until we unlock it.
And the cats in these scenes are often hidden underneath things. That’s fine when a box jiggles or a carpet has a big lump underneath, but some of the locations are bizarre to say the least. A public service announcement for you: in the park, click on every last cobblestone and under every bench. That will save you the headaches that we had.
The frustrations of the bonus levels only mildly sour the rest of the game. Because Hidden Cats in New York is an absolute steal. A little over £2 nets you two hours of hidden cat enjoyment, perfectly wrapped up in a black and white bow. The presentation is adorable, the art even more so, and everybody in our family has exhausted it once each. We can imagine re-downloading it in a couple of years to do it all again.
So, if you were wondering whether £2.49 is too good to be true, then – just this once – you needn’t worry. Hidden Cats in New York would be worth it at twice the price.