Little Kitty, Big City Review (Xbox Series X|S)

Little Kitty, Big City is the inaugural release for indie developer Double Dagger Studio. It’s a fun and silly venture centering around a mischievous little kitty trying to find their way back home. We were interested to understand where the makers of such wholesome content had been, and let us tell you, we were surprised. Before setting up the new Seattle-based studio, Matt T. Wood, the founder of Double Dagger, previously worked for Valve on FPS titles such as Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. It’s not exactly the wrap sheet we were expecting, but we’ve got to respect a developer with that level of range.

Anyway, besides a good scritch behind the ear, and an oh-so biiiig stretch, naps are the cornerstone of what makes a good day, well, good. Cat lovers will understand nobody loves naps more than our beloved feline frenemies. They are experts in the field of plopping one’s fuzzy derrière atop a surface to settle for a horizontal life pause.

How apt that Little Kitty, Big City should start with our nameless mouser, basking in the warm rays of the morning sun. Unsurprisingly our kittycat’s nap spot of choice happens to be situated atop the tallest building in the city. All it takes is one overzealous stretch to get this furball rolling down into the streets. Thankfully, a cat always lands in a bin (that’s the idiom, right?) and from a stinky starting point, and a big city to explore, we’re off to find our way home. You know, after we’ve wreaked absolute havoc in true cat fashion.

The final objective of Little Kitty, Big City mirrors our own after a long day: scale a tall apartment building for big naps. To do this, players must first venture out into the bright and bubbly streets to gobble down tasty fish and muster up enough climbing energy to begin the ascent. However, we are playing as a soon-to-be master of mischief and tomfoolery, so what’s the rush?

Throughout Little Kitty, Big City, players earn their chaotic stripes by completing silly tasks for a charming cast of chatty street animals. In one mission, you have to collect doodads of shininess from hard to reach places to trade with an “entrepreneurial” crow. In another, you’re tasked with rounding up hyperactive ducklings for a, quite frankly, awful Duck Dad. Did we mention how we’re rewarded? With hats. Yes, hats. Adorable little accessories to customise our kitty (42 in total). We also receive emotes (like “yukky”) to express our views on cucumber landsnakes, and many fun catchievements.

Little Kitty, Big City is a puzzle-platformer catlectathon. Its medium-sized sandbox city is host to several napping spots and for most of its 2-5 hour runtime, it’s enjoyable, if a bit repetitive. But such is the life of a cat.

Many of us have watched a cat chaotically push a glass off a table without consequence and thought, “I wish I was a cat”. Well our favourite thing about Little Kitty, Big City is the opportunity to be just that: a cheeky cat in a city full of distractions. We loved having the freedom (and parkour skills) to climb up on hard-to-reach ledges, to swipe and send plant pots careening towards their concrete demise, and to quite literally “give a dog a bone” in order to access new areas of the map.

The distractions are really good fun. We enjoyed having our very own Gojira moment by wandering through a miniature cityscape as the suddenly indomitable Big Kitty. Later, we traipsed our little toe beans through wet paint and inadvertently became the next Meownardo Da Vinci. Oh, and whilst we’re talking about artists, our personal highlight was donning a cute turtle hat (a la Ninja Turtles), biting down on a katana, and putting fear into the local hoomans - CA-TURTLE POWER!

The writing nestled away in this charming, indie adventure is fun, wholesome, and generally decent. Certain animal pals - yeah, we’re talking about you “#influencerbug” - do drag on a little too much for our liking. And sure, we might be aging millennials, but do we really need to explain what ‘lol’ means in 2024? Another feature we weren’t too keen on was the Petwork series of fast travel points. It’s not that it didn’t work as intended, but given the small scale of the city, it had us wondering if it was wholly necessary.

Whilst we’re focusing on the bits we didn’t love about Little Kitty, Big City, it’s worth mentioning that controlling our feline friend can be a bit finicky. Having recently blasted through Annapurna Interactive’s ‘Stray’ (one of Craig’s all-time faves), Little Kitty, Big City had some big paws to fill. Look, it’s not bad. It certainly does the job it needs to do, but we often found ourselves missing easy jumps and getting stuck in places due to some avoidable jank. At one point, our kitty got so irrevocably stuck in some pipes that the game turned into a fuzzy vortex and we had to load a previous save file to continue playing. Aside from this, we’re happy to report that Little Kitty, Big City runs purrfectly fine on the Xbox Series X/S consoles.

Visually, the animal characters, the city, and the overarching vibe of Little Kitty, Big City is really pleasing. From the big green eyes of our hero cat, to the streets, rooftops and indoor spaces, things are wonderfully charming. Well, almost everything. The humans don’t have faces, and it’s unsettling.