Lullaby To A Kitten
You’re sitting in your armchair in the living room, legs crossed comfortably as you’re staring at your phone screen. The tiles are piling up, and you must match them. You must keep matching them. Carrot to the carrot. Clover to the clover. Melon to the melon. Each formation harder than the last. Each of them testing both your luck and your skill. But it keeps happening. You match yourself into a corner with no way out.
You look up at the cat. A beautiful Maine Coon with flowing brown fur and black stripes. It’s looking at you expectantly. Keep matching, human. The cat needs a new costume. You must keep matching tiles. You must keep playing… or keep paying.
The Cute
Published by Boltrend Games, My Cat Tiles is a puzzle game for cat lovers. The moment you start the title for the first time, you are welcomed by the 23 seconds long lullaby-style piano loop that pervades every part of the ordeal.
Get used to it, because it’s one of only two music tracks the game has to offer. That, combined with the relaxing gameplay and the colorful yet somehow still muted graphics make for a Zen-like experience. Try not to fall asleep, though.
The title mixes the well-known traits of a match-3 puzzle game with what seems like mahjong, making for a rather interesting experience. Each level presents you with a tile layout with various icons like baby carrots, tulips or peppers. Tapping on these tiles puts them into a storage area on the bottom.
Having three identical tiles in there makes them disappear. Having seven tiles in storage without a match means game over. It sounds simple, but the game has ways to make things difficult. The game has ways to make you lose.
Some of the tiles can show up covered in a gold coating. The golden surface breaks if you don’t collect the tile within a few moves, turning them into normal tiles.
The levels keep track of how many golden tiles you can collect, but doing or not doing so doesn’t seem to do anything at all. It’s hard to say if this is meant to provide some additional challenge without consequences or simply points at unfinished game design.
The Mean
My Cat Tiles commits the puzzle-game cardinal sin of randomized puzzles, leaving your chance of success or failure partly at the mercy of luck. Each level has a set layout of tiles you must work with, but the icons on those tiles are randomized each time.
A baby carrot you so desperately need can easily end up buried under a dozen other tiles, and there’s nothing you can do about it except use a power-up. How do I know that this is the case? Because one of the power-ups allows you to re-randomize the tiles, which can only be a useful course of action if the icon distribution is arbitrary in the first place.
It doesn’t stop there, though. What makes this randomness damning to the gameplay is that the tile layouts in latter puzzles aren’t big enough to incorporate all the tiles of the level. To fit the rest, they are stacked up and placed somewhere around the layout.
Only the topmost tile’s icon is visible in these stacks, so there’s no telling what’s underneath. Sometimes, you have to rely on blind faith and hope the next tile under is the one you need, otherwise you might as well use a power-up or restart.
The Ugly
But what happens when you lose? First of all, the game utilizes a stamina system. You can have up to five lives, losing one each time you fail a level. You automatically gain a life every 30 minutes.
This is nothing new as plenty of mobile games utilize similar systems. But as we already established, My Cat Tiles goes out of its way to make victory or failure depend on more than just skill.
A bad luck streak can quickly burn through these lives, at which point the player is graciously offered the chance to restore them using coins. What are coins? To put it simply, coins are the lifeblood of My Cat Tiles gameplay.
Out of lives? Pay some coins! Need more power-ups? Spend some coins! You lost but don’t want to completely restart the level? Yep, coins have got you covered!
But how do you get coins? The game gives the player a meager amount for completing a certain number of levels or doing certain daily tasks, but not nearly enough to make up for the life-guzzling nature of latter puzzles. Which means we’re off to the cash shop.
My Cat Tiles offers a dozen ways to spend your money, too many to list in fact. But to put the above into perspective, the title’s most expensive pack allows the player to spend around $135 for a single purchase of coins.
There are also the usual power-up bundles and even a “cat pass” that allows you to earn consistent rewards by playing, sort of like a battle pass. This is why I never brought up the excuse that this game must be for young children. You can’t make a game for kids but also include a $135 coin pack in your cash shop.
My Dress-Up Cat
After all is said and done, you might wonder why I haven’t been talking about the cat-keeping aspect of My Cat Tiles. That’s because it’s honestly an inconsequential part of the game. The purpose of beating the levels is to earn currency you can spend to decorate a room for your cat and feed, pet, and bathe them.
But it’s not something like a Tamagotchi where you’re taking care of your cat. It’s more just a checklist you fill out before moving on to the next room and cat to do the same thing. Playing with the cat boils down to looking at it up close, and dressing it up is purely aesthetic.
“Feed, train, play and dress up your favorite kittens,” boasts the official website, and they technically aren’t lying. My Cat Tiles has a great idea that could have worked for cat lovers and puzzle game enthusiasts alike, but it sadly buries itself in the need to milk the player of their money.
Ignoring the monetization means shallow, often unfair gameplay and non-consequential cat-keeping that feels like an afterthought. It may work as something to do for a short time before falling asleep, but if you’re a cat lover yourself, you probably already own a cat or two. You would be better off spending your money on them instead.
