Kitty Death Room Review

Good Thing Cats Have Nine Lives

You peer into the lava below. You’ve made it this far—the big red heart that marks the exit is so tantalizingly close, you can practically touch it. This last jump. That’s all it comes down to. As you stand atop the body of your own pale clone, you prepare for this final challenge. Muscles tensed, mind racing, you try to calculate the optimal jump trajectory. After just a moment of hesitation, you gather your courage, take a step back, and…

You slip.

Instead of the majestic leap to safety that you envisioned, you clumsily tumble straight down into the searing hot liquid below. You barely have the time to let out a disappointed “mew” before everything goes dark, and you find yourself back at the start of the level. Try again.

Nintendo Hard

The above little snippet will be a common situation if you decide to embark on the challenge that is Kitty Death Room. Created by indie game studio Raiyumi, the title initially tries to trick the player into thinking it’s going to be a fun little walk in the park. With its appealing pixel art style, cute kitty protagonist and chipper soundtrack, one might easily think this is a game for little kids, sort of a “my first platformer” kind of deal. But you will very quickly realize that it’s anything but.

The game boasts three zones, each with 18 levels, which makes for quite a lengthy experience. By the time you get to the middle of Zone 2, it becomes very clear that the game chooses violence. If you want to progress, you will have to “get good”.

While the developer masterfully designed the levels to test your skills of precision platforming, it does often make the controls feel a bit too slippery for such a task. It’s very easy to overshoot a jump and accidentally end up somewhere you didn’t intend to go (like into the spikes). After a bit of practice it’s possible to get used to it, but it can definitely feel like one of the biggest learning curves of the game. Not the only one — just the biggest.

I Am My Own Stepping Stone

The main mechanics that you will have to master in Kitty Death Room are the platforming, and creating pale clones of yourself to aid you with said platforming. This usually means controlling the clones to jump into certain death, so you can use the resulting bodies as platforms to get over hazardous terrain. While this is by no means a mechanic invented by this game, it makes full use of the clones to the point where mastering every little trick you can do with them is downright necessary for success.

One example of such a tech that I had a particularly tough time getting the hang of would be creating a clone while mid-air, then immediately moving the clone back under your character so it lands on top, allowing you to carry your sleeping kitty wherever you want. It sounds simple. It is not. Those six words perfectly describe the gameplay, actually.

Completionist Fever

If you’re like me and want to flex your hardcore gamer card at every opportunity, or you just like the game enough to want to go above and beyond with it, Kitty Death Room has got you covered. The game offers two ways to show off your KDR skills: time trials and secret tapes.

Time trial is what it sounds like: get through the 18 levels of a zone as fast as possible. For this purpose, the game has a nifty in-game timer perfect for speed runners. It also keeps record of your best time, encouraging online competition. Some people have already managed to beat Zone 1 in less than 10 minutes, showing mastery of the game that I could only dream of.

If you’ve ever played hardcore platformers like Kitty Death Room, then the concept of secret tapes might not be entirely new to you. Hidden across the levels of the game, there are 12 mysterious cassette tapes to be found. These tapes grant access to something the game calls a “big secret”, though I’d rather not spoil it. The tapes themselves usually require either mastery of the platforming mechanics or a thorough exploration of the levels, as they can be quite well hidden. Sometimes maybe a bit too well hidden, covering behind inconspicuous unmarked parts of the terrain that you’d never even think to touch. Anyone who can find all 12 tapes without an online guide has my utmost respect.

Kitty Death Room is without a doubt a challenging title. The quickly ramping difficulty combined with the aforementioned slippery controls results in a steep learning curve. It might cause some initial frustration, but it also makes mastery of the platforming kitten that much more satisfying.