The Cat Lady is a graphic adventure game with supernatural and horror themes. The basic gameplay is simple; explore, solve puzzles, talk to characters with a choice of dialogue options. It has a very grim atmosphere and deals with subject matter such as depression, death, and loneliness.

You play as Susan Ashworth, a 40-something woman who is alone, except for some cats, for which she has some natural affinity for, depressed and at the beginning of the game has just overdosed on prescription sleeping pills. However, she appears in a strange field where she encounters her own corpse, a deer, and a cabin where she meets The Queen Of Maggots. The Queen explains to Susan that she won't allow Susan to die until she has got rid of 5 evil people (“parasites”, she calls them) from the living world, or else suffer for eternity, unable find peace. The Queen convinces Susan to comply (she doesn't really have much choice), makes her immortal, and sends her back to the real world to carry out the task.

For the rest of the game, Susan exists in an odd sort of limbo, the main effect of which is she can't be killed permanently due to the immortality she is cursed/blessed with (making a convenient narrative reason for checkpoint restarts if she is killed). Another apparent side-effect of this is that she frequently has some kind of hallucinations, usually when she is unconscious or is “killed”. When this happens she is transported to strange, abstract dream-like locations where she must solve puzzles and find a way back to the real world.

Some of the puzzles in the game are actually quite clever; you will need to solve riddles and search for clues in the scenery, though mostly they just involve simple tasks like searching for an item to enable you to unlock something or reach something, combining items to make more useful items or weapons etc. A few of the puzzles are a bit too obtuse, but discovering objects and figuring out what to do with them (whilst avoiding the mentally unhinged “parasites”) is the most fun part of the game.

The other parts of the game consist of basically listening to dialogue between characters to progress the story. Though you are given dialogue options during most of them conversations, only a few have choices that will affect the narrative in any way. Usually all you can do is choose the order in which Susan says her lines, seemingly just for the sake of having some interaction to stop the player getting too bored. The narrative is interesting, but lacks cohesion. The story at times flits about between past and present events, in what seems to be an attempt to make it seem unnecessarily complex. It also pretty much completely falls apart during the last act in which a series of nonsensical events lead up to a dissatisfying conclusion (at least in the case of my ending, as it alters depending on your choices in the last chapter).



Though Harvester Games deserves some praise for putting the effort into having a full voice cast, I wonder if the end result was really worth it, as for the most part it is a complete mess. To start with their budget was stretched to the limit judging by the sound quality alone. Much of the voice work sounds as though it was recorded using a low-quality built-in microphone on a laptop, resulting in crackling and lack of tone and definition which made it somewhat uncomfortable to listen to.

This wouldn't have been so bad if the writing and voice acting had been up to scratch.

Many of the conversations between characters having little flow to them, as well as sounding unnatural and disjointed due to odd inflections used on words and awkwardly fluctuating tones of voice, making the dialogue make even less sense in context of some scenes and simply painful to listen to in others.

The dialogue writing does little to improve the character portrayals. Characters will sometimes use typical English phrases such as “geezer” or “blimey”, even when those words don't match with their accents at all. Some characters are turned almost into parodies due to overacting, forced accents and odd choices of words in the dialogue. The “evil” characters in particular came off as comic villains and would have fit better into a game that takes itself less seriously, whereas in The Cat Lady they clash horribly with the tone of the game.

We are clearly supposed to empathise with Susan and root for her to overcome her struggles (she is the protagonist after all), but her character is so morose and her attitude so cynical that she comes off as not a nice person, so I found it difficult to care about her at all. On top of she often spouts phrases that sound like a goth teen's terrible poetry. For example: “Standing by the river I wonder, do I need a stone...? No...my heart is heavy enough...it will drag me down for sure.” and “I have fallen in love with the razor” are among such morbid musings that made my eyes roll a lot.


The Cat Lady's audio-visual style is where it earns most of its plus points. It has a very distinctive art style; everything is drawn to look like a graphic novel of sorts and character models are 2-D and move in jerky, inarticulate motions as they would if they were made of paper. The colour palette is mainly shades of grey and black punctuated by sharply contrasting shades of white and lots of red (usually blood, of course), along with the tastefully minimal use of other colours such as sickly greens and orange/yellow hues from light sources, which all blend nicely together with the impressively detailed background scenery. Overall, the graphics and art are probably my favourite elements of the game, as they are suited perfectly to its grisly, macabre theme.

The music is similarly atmospheric. A combination of bleak acoustic guitar/piano tracks, occasional heavy-rock beats along with dramatic strings and minimalistic electronica sounds make for a pleasing audio style in The Cat Lady.

Overall, what could have been a decent puzzle-adventure game that explores mature themes is spoilt by a haphazard story, poor acting and writing.