• Price: $19.99 USD (currently on sale with a launch discount: $17.99 until December 21st)
• Developer/Publisher: Falcon Entertainment
• Release Date: November 30, 2023

A review code was kindly provided by Falcon Entertainment. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

I had a lot of fun with the original Cattails on Switch. While I do love dogs, I am definitely more of a cat purr-son, so I love to play games focused on them. I’ve been looking forward to standalone sequel Cattails: Wildwood Story for a while now, as it’s said to expand on features from the original game. Let’s dive in and check out its feline features!

Kitty Customization

When you start a new game, you’re taken to the character creation screen. There are 30 preset cat designs, or you can really customize your kitty by utilizing a color picker. The customization screen allows you to choose colors for individual body parts such as each eye/ear/paw, the nose and muzzle, the head, base torso, legs, and tail.

The game has an impressive amount of choices for you to make. Beyond color, you can also decide if you want stripes and/or patches and/or additional patterns like rosettes. You can make individual choices on the body type (i.e. shorthair, fluffy, etc.) for their torso, face, ears, and tail. Then you can add an accessory to your look, and select a voice and voice pitch for your cat’s meow. Once you’ve finished your design, you can save it to use again in the future.

After that, there are still some decisions to be made for the game’s difficulty and accessibility. You can apparently change these features at any time. There are 5 difficulty levels and 4 modes for how quickly time passes. If you’re not a fan of spiders, they’ve got an arachnophobia mode that makes them appear as circles in the game instead. The font can be changed to something more dyslexia-friendly, and flashes of light can be turned off. Players can also use the touchscreen for menu functions.

Into the (Wild)Woods

With those choices out of the way, the story begins. Three cat colonies once lived on the same land, which was protected by the Forest Guardian. Everything was fine until an earthquake destroyed their temple, causing the Forest Guardian to start fading away. This land was no longer safe, so the Forest Guardian asked the 3 clans to find a new home and build them a new temple, or else they would perish!

Naturally your character decided to gather members from all 3 clans to work together towards this common goal. After some time, your group arrives at the Wildwood; the Forest Guardian tells you that this will be your new home because you’re meant to eradicate the voidling cat threat there.

Now you get to make some more decisions! You get to choose between 6 settlement areas in the Wildwood to make your home: Forest, Meadow, Swamp, Beach, Volcano, or Desert. Then you get to name your colony, choose how it’s described (domain vs kingdom, etc.), its emblem, and your title as the leader.

You’ll build the Forest Guardian’s temple pretty quickly, and you get to manage the colony’s layout with the Build Menu, which gives you the ability to move houses and remove plants that are in your way. You can decorate the interior of your house as well. The colony is fairly small at first, and only has a few residents. You’ll have to lure more citizens with some appealing purrks perks.

Hunting & Gathering

The temple has a menu that shows you what you need to donate in order to lure more cats. They’ll want specific prey or herbs before they’ll move in. Besides bringing in more cats, you need to eat some prey and prevent yourself from starving. You’ve got a health and hunger meter; your health can take damage from environmental hazards such as spikes, but also from the more predatory “prey” such as venomous snakes who cause status effects – or from your hunger meter hitting zero.

Since you’re a cat and therefore an obligate carnivore, you’re going to have to eat prey like mice. If you’re squeamish about attacking other animals – even without blood – you may want to steer clear. I’m rather squeamish myself, but as these are not realistic animals I was fine with it.

You have to sneak up on your prey as close as you can without getting caught, then press the ZR button at the right time during a quick time mini game to catch it. There are some accessibility features for catching prey, but none that make a guaranteed catch every time.

In addition to catching food, you can catch bugs and gather herbs with different uses. The bugs are much easier to catch, as you don’t have to play the mini game and they don’t really fly away from you. They aren’t edible, but make nice gifts for other cats and may sell for a good price depending on rarity.

Building & Befriending

Anything you don’t keep in your inventory to eat later should be reserved for recruitment, gifting, stockpiling, or selling. When you donate the right items to bring a cat to your colony, you get to place their house where you want it to go. You start the game with fan favorite Krampy the healer, a general store, and a mine. It’s up to you to bring in the cats who open facilities like a museum or garden.

There are actually a decent amount of things to do in town. You can turn herbs you’ve found into seeds and plant them in the small garden to harvest even more. Herbs have a variety of functions, including HP restoration, curing status ailments, enhancing your attack, or even increasing your domain’s influence in an area.

Herbs are quite useful in the mines too, as sometimes hostile creatures pop up and attack you. (You can also craft some items that make things easier on you.) Each mine has 100 levels and several checkpoints, which allow you to start again from a deeper level. Anything you find in the mine can be sold to the mining moles, whose currency can be used on some neat items such as furniture.

Apart from day-to-day events in town, there are also festivals once a season (each season consists of 10 days). Two cats offer cute little mini games for you to play – one is more of a side game, while the other is the main event. You earn tokens based on your performance, which you can spend on fun furniture or outfits.

In between your daily activities and festive events, you can manage your new domain at the Founder’s Stone in the middle of town, which lets you move buildings, check resource stockpiles, and change administrative details. Donating items to the stockpiles activates perks for the rest of the day, or you can use stockpiled resources on construction projects that benefit your community.

After bringing in new cats, you can figure out what they like by talking to them every day. Talking to them and giving them something they like are both actions that will increase friendship levels, and you also earn points by completing one of their tasks on the Task Board in town. Task Tokens can be redeemed for rewards like prey, experience, Mews/money, accessories, or furniture.

You can’t even enter the other cats’ houses until you’ve increased your friendship levels to about 2 stars (with the exception of the cats who offer services). At 3 stars, you can ask a cat to “buddy up” with you and go hunting together. Each cat has their own passive and active traits that will help you out. They can level up and gain strength, and even if they reach zero HP you can go find them again in town on the same day at full health, which I really liked.

Battles & Brain Teasers

As mentioned above, you won’t just encounter prey in the wild. You’ll also run into dangerous voidling cats. It’s best to bring one of your friends with you to increase your odds of success in battle. You earn experience from pretty much everything you do in the game, which can be used to learn and upgrade skills.

The Wildwood map keeps track of the areas you control and also how much influence you currently have over each square. Catching prey and defeating enemies increase your influence in an area. You can send squads to different areas every day (depending on how many squads you’ve unlocked); if you control an area, your squads will gather its associated resources and put them towards the resource stockpiles.

Most of the voidling cats you face are minor enemies. You may take even more damage from the snakes, rats, bats, or crabs you catch as “prey.” But there’s a greater threat for you to manage in the Wildwood, which requires you to investigate the 4 Dark Ruins.

Each Dark Ruin hosts minor enemies and puzzles before you reach its Big Boss. I’m not great at puzzles, but I think the ones in this game aren’t too difficult. I didn’t need to look anything up to solve them. I had more trouble with the environmental hazards and status effects in the pre-boss portions of the third and fourth ruins than I did with any of the puzzles or bosses. Still, they’re nice ways of conveying the plot. After you’ve completed the main story, you can recruit one final cat.

“Meow-rriage” 💍

Around the time you complete the main story, you probably will have started to date one of the cats in your domain. Once you get them to 4 stars of friendship, you can ask to date them by giving them a rose. While dating them, you then have to get them up to 4 hearts to propose with a ring. You can even choose between wedding venues!

After you get married, you need to get your spouse’s ring level up to 4 in order for them to ask if you want kittens. 🥰 I believe it took about 8 days after I said yes for 4 kittens to be born. You get to name each one and choose between 5 pattern options for each of them; these patterns are based on your fur and that of the other parent’s. Any accessories you’ve unlocked can also be equipped on the kittens! When it comes to their active and passive abilities, they are preset, but you can change them later.

They included rival marriages to make things more interesting, so every now and then you’ll see events centered around another pair. The good news is that one of them will come to you and ask if it’s a good idea for them to date before they do anything, so it seems like you can stop them from getting married if you like one of them. If you tell them it’s a good idea, they’ll have an adorable ceremony and eventually come to your house to introduce their new kitten.

You can bring any kitten with you to go hunting, and increase their buddy levels like their parents. Once you get one of your kittens maxed out at buddy level 10, you can go to the temple and start Mew New Game+. “Experience an alternate reality” with a new save file that includes bonuses based on your character and that kitten. Your kitten will be grown up in this file, and you start the game all over again as a different “main character.” This includes a list of what you keep in NG+, which thankfully includes your house expansions/decorations plus your accessories!

Overall Impressions: Paw-sitive ✅

It really feels like a lot of work went into expanding on the premise of the original Cattails game. I think the plot isn’t massive or life-changing, but it works. That’s the only thing I can really think of that I can criticize here. In terms of the artistic elements, I loved the art that accompanies the opening, the character portraits, and the graphics overall. And I responded well to the jazzy soundtrack.

The game runs well, and I enjoyed exploring the Wildwood and participating in the wide range of activities it has to offer. There’s a lot to do and a lot to choose – Cattails: Wildwood Story’s customization and accessibility options are fantastic. With no time constraints on finishing the story, it’s a relaxing, cozy cat simulation game that’s a lot of fun.