Recent reviews by thegreatpie

If you love Pokemon and want a fresh take on a pocket monster adventure, and you also like urban sci-fi, this is the game for you. There's lots of tiers of reward systems that make for a lot of little extra dopamine rewards, a broad host of monster designs, three different tiers of rarity, and you do get to dress up your character.

lil cat paws go tap tap and give me the serotonin. That's enough on its own but also you can get HATS and SKINS.

For how quickly boring and repetitive the game becomes, it sure thinks highly of itself with its achievements. Even after straining myself *well* beyond what was fun, deep into "I'm doing a seriously boring chore," territory, I only managed to get the 5000L water achievement. While the game is novel it's entertaining enough but that's true of most things. It quickly becomes annoying and frustrating, especially because your inventory is too small for end game, for no reason, and no way to expand it! This game isn't an idle game, at all (the water needs you to constantly babysit it, you have to harvest everything by hand every time forever, and you have to hand fill all orders) so you'd expect it to have more content than an idle game. It's not worth your time.

So my choice of "no" is a little nuanced. For what the game is, it's perfectly fine - and what the game is a Steam version of a crappy mobile game with a mediocre translation. If that's what you want to get, then yeah, get the game. It's definitely a lot better with a one-time purchase than doing a mobile equivalent where they're always nickle and diming you with microtransactions. But do I recommend the game? In general? At no point am I going to say to anyone, "Hey you should play Dragon Cliff." So, no. Part of that is this is the sort of game where I find it really hard to put together a superior strategy. There's so many little pieces that you have to put together, many of which you might not be very clear on how it affects things or what it does at all, that it becomes very difficult to discern what's even important or not. And you can get to a point where even when you follow a walkthrough and just do whatever it says to do, you still get stuck much sooner than the walkthrough writer did and wonder what you're doing wrong. A big part of it is that the plot is... uncomfortable and doesn't really feel resolved? I mean if you pay attention to zero text then I suppose it does, because you defeat the final boss, yay! But if you DO read the text you gotta wonder if you're a propagandized brainwashed murder machine and like... especially in the current climate I don't love that. I would never appreciate that plot regardless but especially not now.
But if all you're looking for is to get to enjoy that crappy lil mobile game experience without doing some kind of 14 days of logging in doing chores bs or whatever, then yeah this game is fine.

This game is a lot of fun as a little distraction. You might enjoy having something else at hand to work on when it becomes a bit grindy, however. The game has a nice range of different environments so the places you explore don't feel particularly repetitive, and the same materials usually have different iterations which keeps collecting things fresh, too. My biggest complaint isn't even anything about its grindy nature (because that's kind of the point of the game); my complaint is that the game punishes you both for trying to explore and for not exploring. If you step off the path at all in a dungeon, you die instantly and lose an ability, which teaches you not to ever step off the path. However, on more than one occasion, you need to take a risk and do something that looks like stepping off the path to gain the character unlock currency. This makes finding all the unlock sparkles really frustrating because there's a couple skills that make the game significantly less obnoxious (most notably pacifism) that I feel I can't afford to lose, so I don't ever want to risk stepping off path. Some hints that it's safe are so subtle, it's too easy to miss. If there was a mechanism for locking skills down so they couldn't be lost, even just one, or if you were allowed to pick what skill to lose, this would be a lot less egregious. I don't love being punished for exploring.
But all told I still really enjoyed my time playing the game.

This game has helped my productivity so much. It gives me just the right balance of distraction and needing to be distracted to work on stuff I actually need to get done while I wait for my biofuel and spare parts to accumulate or a bit of land to be cleared or something to be built. And it's cozy and cute and relaxing! Now that I've unlocked the sakura garden, I'm less worried about a highly efficient farm and more enjoying how pretty I can make it.

This game crashes CONSTANTLY. I tried to play it on the Steam deck three separate times and each time it crashed upon reaching my farm. I tried to play it on my tablet. Three of my play hours were from sitting on the initial loading screen before the game even began because it froze there, twice, and I hoped the second time it might go if I just give it a moment? (and then was distracted by real life for a few hours.) Nope, didn't ever go. I HAVE to play it on my high quality gaming computer and it still freezes up when I get a quest or something, though it may manage to pull through. This just really isn't that impressive of a game to be freezing up on a proper gaming computer, let alone other devices that have already proven themselves perfectly capable with many other games. I'm not even doing multiplayer or anything.

So it's hard for me to truly pick yes or no for whether or not I recommend the game. I personally found the story of growth and the MC's character arc enjoyable, but it's easy not to enjoy from a player position. I liked the elements of real-life strategies for calming and anchoring yourself (except tarot, which doesn't stand a chance of working if you don't even believe in it lol)
But like, it is very much so a visual novel with gameplay elements that I wouldn't really call "enjoyable," especially as the game doesn't give you much space to fail beyond literally skipping things. And the achievements really do expect you to play the game at least six times, if you do not mess with your save files. (You should mess with your save files; it's possible to get all six romantic/platonic endings if you play your cards right. Just be careful about saving around day 12 for the two festival endings and you're good to go. It absolutely isn't worth playing through the whole thing six times. It's not even worth doing it twice.) Any good VN has an easy way to re-play interactions that matter; any good VN has a good way to skip all dialogue, and if it's possible on a keyboard, no one's seem to have found the button for it. So ultimately for those gameplay mechanical reasons, I don't recommend the game.

This is some of the most fun I've had in a while. If you played the original Cattails game, this one is an improvement in every way, and you'll love it.
This game has an improved hunting system, with a microgame to catch prey (a simple moving bar). If for some reason you liked the slightly random element of success in the last game, you can enable it in settings. You're able to design and customize your colony space immediately and there's a lot of options right from the start. There's more little stories between all the cats in your colony, and there's a wide variety of cats. Also you get to bring the best doctor with you (It's Krampy). Also the achievements are less onerous - you still need to catch a legendary prey and a legendary bug, but only one of each. And it doesn't ask you to complete more than three years, none of this ten nonsense. There's different types of power paws that boost different stats. The museum is hilarious. The mine is centralized. There's just a ton of QoL upgrades and it is so much fun.

This game plays nicely into my ADHD coping mechanism of distraction productivity. Idk how long it will last but any amount of managed productive time is a miracle to me.