As the old meme goes, cats always land on their feet and buttered toast always lands butter side down. If you strap them together, they will hover infinitely as the paradox cannot be resolved. This meme forms the backbone but not the totality of CATO: Buttered Cat, a puzzle platformer about a cat and buttered toast.
In CATO, developed by Team Woll and published by GCORES PUBLISHING, you play as a cat. You also play as a sentient piece of toast, capable of speech. As the game begins, the cat’s milk machine has broken and the toast needs milk to remain properly buttered, so off the two go into the depth of the facility they live in for the parts they need. On the way they will need to use the powers of cat, toast, and the combined cato along with everything else they find along the way to progress through the strange rooms they keep teleporting into.
As the cat, you have the ability to move left and right at a steady pace and stop wherever you like. You can also climb certain walls, fit through narrow passages, and press down paw switches. You’re not keen to jump, but you can safely land from any height. The powers of toast are equally powerful, in their own way. You can jump left or right at two fixed angles, and you can stick to walls before sliding down. You can also jump off of walls, interact with toast switches, and enter the several kinds of toaster that exist around the facility. Together, the cat and toast combination can use its powers of paradox to fly forever. Of course, it’s not as easy as combining the cat and toast and you win, of course. No, CATO is necessarily much more complicated than that.
As mentioned, there are switches that only the cat and only the toast can activate, that control things like doors, elevated platforms, and rotating segments of level. Some of these are only active when the cat or toast stand on them, others require the cat or toast to wait to activate and stay on until deactivated. The toasters mentioned eject the toast in a powerful straight line whenever it uses them. Rotating walls and floors will launch the toast at speed perpendicular to the direction they wind up at, but the cat will get shoved but stop moving. Paradox clouds will sometimes prevent the cat and toast joining up, or sometimes disassembling when inside. Sometimes these clouds become impassable walls when the cat and toast are joined up, and sometimes they only become impermeable when the two are joined. You have to use both the powers of the cat and toast joined and separate to solve the puzzles and get the two heroes where they need to be to hop in a teleporter to the next set of puzzles.
CATO is full of so many puzzle elements but they all work together beautifully. For example, while the toast can jump off nearly any surface, it can’t jump off glass; it either just falls off glass walls if you try and jump or just flops in place on floor glass. The cat can walk on glass just fine The level that introduces this element has a perfectly sized paradox cloud that becomes a wall when cat and toast are joined. It’s set so that if the toast lands on the glass you learn the toast can’t move, but such that you can rescue the toast with the cat and take it back to a non glass section of floor and try again without locking yourself out. Another hazard is the sometimes green and sometimes purple stuff that kills the cat or toast on contact. The first few levels have some you can drop into, but there’s a specific early level where you must unjoin the cat and toast at the very beginning that almost guarantees a quick death right away to teach you about the hazard without losing any actual time in the level. That level of attention to detail persists throughout CATO, not just in regular puzzle levels, but in its secret areas, side mission paths, and boss fights as well. There are some later levels that are complicated enough that you might softlock yourself in, but there’s a restart level button that’s always a button hold away should you need it.
There are also secret areas and side missions to find. These secret areas are marked by a special icon on the level map, and while some of them are as easy to find as rubbing up against the right wall at the right time, several others require some very unorthodox alternate puzzle solutions to find. Each of these grant a skin for either the cat or toast, but the side missions often require a special extra challenge that include one of the games many wrinkles to the basic formula. First off, there’s the side mission gimmick, which is being able to transpose the positions of the cat and toast, preserving whatever momentum the other had after. This gimmick combines with other later gimmicks, and each world has a new one. The second world introduces a new type of wall and floor, which bounces the cat, but which the toast sticks to without sliding down. The third world introduces the idea of spare ‘burnt’ toast bodies that automatically trigger things like the toaster eject as soon as it interacts with one, and which become the ‘standard’ toast you can control when picked up by cat while turning any other toast in the level inert, requiring complicated and precise juggling of fresh and burnt toast to complete levels. There’s also the holding pods for the tubes the cat can crawl into, some of which allow the cat to move at hyperspeed, there’s gel that the cat and toast can only enter at high speed and which the cat can swim around in if it can stop inside one. There’s shadowy duplicates of the cat that always want to follow the toast, can be picked up by the cat just like the toast and burnt toast and which can activate the same paw switches the cat can. There are lots of puzzle features and tons of levels to use them in. Each world has at least 30 or so levels inside it, more if you include the side paths, and with five worlds that’s a lot of puzzles to play through.
While there’s not combat in most of the levels, there are a few puzzle bosses in CATO at the end of some worlds, and slide levels at the end of others. The slide levels are just that, the cat and toast on a long slide trying to jump to avoid spikes and pick up sparklies and make it to the end of the level. The bosses on the other hand require utilization of the world’s major gimmick, like the boss of the third world requires you to protect multiple slices of toast and use them in sequence to get a robot to stop attacking you and expose its weak point and then attack that weak point.
CATO is the best kind of puzzler. One that starts devilishly simply, ramps up to mind-bendingly inscrutable, and then makes absolute perfect sense once the lightbulb flashes and you understand what you have to do. If you like puzzles, cats, or toast, CATO is definitely going to have you purring.
Tim reviewed CATO on PC with a review code.
