Cat RPG Review: Little Kitty, Big City

	MY CUTE WITTLE BABY 🥺🥺🥺😙😙😙
	ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: BIG KITTY, LITTLE CITY

So after waiting 3 years and wanting to play this ever since Stray came out, I finally got my chance to play Little Kitty Big City on Steam. It plays very similar to Stray, however it doesn’t have the dark undertones and the kitty is never hurt. In Stray when the cat fell or got hurt he would limp a little and it would just break my heart. In here, our cat is a superman and can just shake it off before moving on to the next wave of mischief.

The trailer says it all right there: the kitty can never actually get hurt from all the mischief. The absolute worst things that can happen to the kitty are getting barked at by dogs, stepping in a puddle, being ambushed by a cucumber, or getting thrown out of a grocery store. Otherwise yep, it’s a puzzle platformer like Stray (or rather, what makes it different from Stray is that this is more of a freeform Metroidvania sandbox while Stray was more linear and story-focused.)

The game takes place not in a big city, but in a small Japanese town. If you’ve never been to Japan you may not realize it but there’s quite a few specific Japan things that I picked up on since I’ve visited several times. The most blatant ones are the amount of shrines everywhere, and the vending machines. The next thing would be the style of Japanese housing/neighborhoods and the type of fences they use. And finally if you’ve ever been to Japan you know exactly the sound you hear when the street light tells you it’s ok to cross. This sound basically nailed it home. You also of course have the fact that almost every person who walks by is salary man/career woman in a suit. 😂 So while it was no big city like Tokyo or New York, I guess for a kitty it’s still “fairly” big but generally you’re just in a small Japanese town. Maybe it’s just the Tokyo Suburb who knows.

Yeah this isn’t actually a big city, it’s just like a single neighborhood in a city. It is kinda funny when you think about it that they almost kinda have to use a Japanese city as the model for the city because let’s face it, if it was an American city it would just be a giant line of parking lots of detached single family houses with one acre yards with nothing to climb up or crawl under. Oh and giant 10 lane roads full of cars, don’t forget those.

The game allows you knock and break flower pots, chase birds, carry random objects, trip people, steal their phones, talk to friendly neighborhood animals, climb tall buildings, and of course be an upstanding catizen by recycling trash the locals have dropped on the ground. As you talk to more animals you can unlock things like being able to climb higher or exchanging currency for a cute new hat. When you have eaten all the fish and maxed out your climbing skills, this is the final step you kinda need in order to climb back home into your building. Of course the sensible thing would be to stand in front of your building’s lobby and meow until someone in the building let you in but then you wouldn’t have vertigo inducing climb up many feet back into the window of your ignoramus owner. I mean, what owner lets their cat sleep on the LEDGE of the window with no catio installed!? Clearly the faceless owner is some animal neglector! 😂

As I mentioned above, unlike Stray which was more about the story, Little Kitty Big City is about exploring the (not so) big city. Yeah, the “true” objective of the game is to get back home but the REAL point of the game is to make animal friends and cause mischief and get people to pet you and wear hats. After all, the first thing you’ll do after finally getting back is…jump right back out the window again to complete all the rest of your animal quests!

Now of course while I did enjoy the game it does have a few minor faults. First of all the game is only maybe about 5-6 hours if you are going for all the achievements. With that in mind the game is also like $25, though I bought it for 10% off as a release celebration price. In my opinion the game should have been maybe $15 at best for the amount of stuff you have to do. Secondly, even if you’re going for achievement completion, the game can be kinda glitchy and some achievements end up being out of reach. For example I gave up on the nest achievement because I would knock them off a ledge instead of “destroying” them which would not count for the achievement. The nest then ended up in some dead zone that was impossible to get to. Frequently the jumps would not let me climb certain places until I tried 3-4 times and sometimes it made me think the place was not climbable rather than game being glitchy.

“Fortunately” the game is quite short, which is a benefit if you’re trying to get the achievements because there are a few that you can screw up. There’s a finite number of objects that don’t reset that get used in some of those achievements or quests and if you accidentally knock one somewhere or grab it without realizing what it is (and you obviously wouldn’t know this when you randomly encounter them) you probably won’t ever find it again. I also felt like I pretty much always had to use the “precision jump” rather than the normal jump to climb anywhere because the controls can be a little awkward and it’s hard to necessarily tell if something isn’t climbable or just that the kitty for some reason didn’t do a “full” jump. That said the environment is muuuuuuuuuuch more intuitive than your typical yellow paint slathered AAA collect-a-thon and in general if you think you can navigate something, you almost certainly can.

At one point the menus started completely showing off screen, particularly during the conversation I had with the baby ducks in the building balcony pool. I had no idea what they were saying because the speech bubbles somehow moved off screen with no way to spin the camera or move them back. Some achievements were also annoying and too RNG based like getting people to take your photo. Most people just ignored me, some would just trip and some would pet me but then move on. The pick up cans and recycle them also got tedious when I ran around but couldn’t find any stray cans laying around to pick up. I also gave up on the rubber duckie achievement even though I got 3/4 because I had no idea where the 4th one even vanished to. And finally the most confusing thing was the map – it looked like you could explore the north and south east parts of it but I could not for the life of me find a way to go there myself. Everything felt blocked off so I’m not really sure why they bothered drawing that area of the map in the first place. Maybe it’s an upcoming DLC?

Honestly/hopefully they’ll be able to do a patch to fix a couple of those achievements that are kind of glitchy like the banana one. Otherwise nearly all of them are pretty easy to get and you don’t really need to do anything out of the ordinary to get them. The only one that was probably excessively grindy is the one to get people to take photos of you. The recycling one probably would have been fine if we had started doing it early in the game but we didn’t attempt to do it until the game was almost done.

So needless to say with the few bugs and not that much to do I feel like the game should have been a bit cheaper. Considering the graphics and the “story” comparison to Stray, Stray felt like it was more worth the value BUT from my “I love cats” POV, I preferred this one because no cats would get hurt and there were no disgusting mutant bacteria to run away from. 😒 I still think if you love cats and want a cute game to play I would recommend it for sure.

There are a lot of complaints about how it’s pretty short but I think the better angle is to maybe compare it more like a movie. People will spend like $15 on a movie and that’s 2 hours long. Well this is more like 5-10 hours long for $25, so from that perspective it’s fine. And meanwhile the flipside is how we end up with stuff like all those overly bloated open worlds that want to make sure that you have 100 hours of nonsense to keep you occupied.

Our cat Mei also approved of this videogame:

Edit: On August 27, 2025 they released an update that let you customize your cat so I finally made the cat in the game look like Mei (above)!