Capsule Review: Cat Quest III
Cat Quest II, plus pirate ships, minus a lot of other things.
The first Cat Quest was a cute, fun, bite-sized experience marred a bit by unbalanced progression and tedious backtracking. About two years later, Cat Quest II came out and it was bigger and better, with new features and polish smoothing out the flaws. Then after almost five more years, this third game came out. I expected it to be another incremental improvement, that much bigger and better with more polish and new features (in this case, ship battles to match the pirate theme). That’s not really what it is. While it is still a bigger-and-better Cat Quest, it feels like an alternate take on that and a sidegrade to Cat Quest II, discarding some of its improvements and adding different ones.
The core is still here: a cute and simple action RPG set in a world populated by anthropomorphic cats, dogs, and now rats. There’s a 2D overworld with quick fights, mini-dungeons to clear, and quests for NPCs. This time, there’s also a pirate ship to sail and ship-to-ship combat, as well as a number of overworld puzzles for hidden treasure. The story is still mostly about setting a light atmosphere with occasional out-of-place, hard-to-understand melodramatic sci-fi bits. And the mechanical emphasis is still on combat and related progression, with straightforward combat whose depth comes from positioning, timing, and build options.
The dual-protagonist thing from II is gone, though, so you can’t maintain two different builds simultaneously. And while there is basically no high-level-content-next-to-low-level-content anymore, there isn’t a linear progression through the different islands or signposted level requirements so it’s not always clear where you should go next (around level 40, I couldn’t find any level-appropriate places to go, so jumped ahead and did level 50 content… and then later found the level 40 stuff I’d missed, which was now trivially easy). And the game is actually noticeably smaller than II, taking me about as long to get through as the first one did. (Also, I was kind of shocked to be playing a studio’s third game, in 2024, where falling in combat reset me to my last manual save and undid unrelated progress and required me to repeat boss intro scenes.)
Overall, I did have some fun here, but I definitely enjoyed II more, and seeing now that the series’s trajectory is more “experiments and offshoots” than “steady improvements” and a lot of the friction I dislike is probably sticking around, I’m less excited to check out future installments.
I Stopped Playing When: I finished a solo playthrough including all side content and achievements. As usual, I did not bother with “Mew Game +” or the “Meow-difiers” challenge modes.
Three Stars: Good. I liked the game enough to finish it (or just play it a bunch, for games that don't end). I recommend it to most genre fans.