Bring on the warm comfy vibes! Cats! Quilts! And… puzzling gameplay? If you’re looking for both a challenging puzzle and cute cats, look no further than Monster Couch’s game, Quilts and Cats of Calico. Full of fluffy (and sleepy) friends and challenging tile laying puzzles based on the hit board game.
Quilts and Cats of Calico is based on the board game Calico, and in some sense an exact replica of the game. A story mode and an online mode are packaged with the game. The story in the story mode is pretty bland and predictable. I appreciate the effort to make the characters diverse in gender and race, but the way the story writes itself contradicts the cozy theme that it’s trying to portray. After perfecting your craft as a quilt maker, you head out to the big city to help out your Aunt Agatha. Your father has left to help with a war that is going on, but you haven’t heard from him since the day he left. The city and surrounding towns are all worried about war, and are hoping that the cats that roam the streets will bless their clothes with good luck. There have also been rumors that the the enemy has been stealing cats. What is happening here? I didn’t start playing a game about cats and quilting so I could learn about the struggles of war. War stories should be handled delicately, but in Quilts and Cats of Calico it’s used as some motivating factor with details that fall flat. Why would the enemy be stealing cats? Why would a town so focused on cats be at war? Instead of a dry story to follow, there should have just been quilting challenges and puzzles. Remove the story altogether and get straight to why people want to play the game: cats and quilt puzzles.
Having received an early version of Quilts and Cats of Calico, a good number of the controls are buggy. When talking to various people in the world, you direct your cart to locations on a fabric map. It seems the cart gets stuck on its own ripples and jitters and stops while you’re trying to direct it. The controls during the actual game are finicky as well, and sometimes opens menu boxes unnecessarily, or gets stuck in between selecting tiles. When placing quilt tiles during the mini puzzles I thought there were hidden rules that I missed because the tiles only allow you to place them on matching color tiles. When playing more, however, it seems like the tiles were only programmed to be placed in the spot that the developers thought were the only solution, not anywhere there’s an open space. It feels like the Quilts and Cats of Calico breaks its own rules and can’t decide what should be considered points or not. There were a few times where I definitely completed a cat configuration, but only a button was given.
With these obvious bugs in Quilts and Cats of Calico, it becomes clear that the developers were trying to do too much. A lot of the extraneous systems in the story mode can be seen in other games, like your typical narrative games and level selectors like Overcooked. If the player was given the levels linearly with a quick dialog overlay before each puzzle or game, then Quilts and Cats of Calico would have been a lot better. Removing these systems would have allowed the developers to spend time perfecting the actual gameplay experience of the levels, rather than waste time on a half-hearted story and unnecessary level selector.
The puzzles in Quilts and Cats of Calico were a happy surprise, as I thought the story would be endless rounds of the game loop (which is fine, the actual game is great). The only problem I have with the puzzles (besides the bugs) is that the puzzles don’t focus on improving an aspect of the game. There could have been a series of puzzles around optimizing bonus tiles or getting the most cats, but I feel that the goal of each puzzle in Quilts and Cats of Calico is roughly the same. There isn’t any clear progression of the puzzles and gameplay. Perhaps Quilts and Cats of Calico feels so solo because you can’t see the other player’s board unless you toggle it. The only indication that there’s another player is a paw that comes out and takes a tile. If the game showed the opponent placing a tile the game would feel like more of a group activity than a fixation on only one player board.
The art all works together in a pleasing way, but the 3D models and cat buttons seem to be slightly too pixelated or strange looking. Cats in general are difficult to model, and portraying all their fur as silky is not realistic of actual cats. Cat faces are integrated in the environment of the world, connecting the importance of the world and cats.
The music in Quilts and Cats of Calico is nice and the audio works well. They both do their job in blending into the game and becoming a part of it. For the gameplay music, I wish it didn’t change every time I reset the level and had background music based on the location I was at.
In summary: Fun and challenging gameplay that gets bogged down by too many unnecessary features that cause buggy controls. Art and music fit the world, but the storyline doesn’t fit the theme.
Jordan played Quilts and Cats of Calico on PC with a review code.
