Cat Me If You Can | Ep. 1 – I’m Not Leaving Until Every Cat Has Had Its Photo Taken
A brand-new series begins, and tonight we have one extremely important objective: photograph the cats. All of them. If there is a cat somewhere that has not had its picture taken, then clearly our work is not finished.
Cat Me If You Can looked like it should be a wonderfully peaceful evening. Instead, it became a mixture of hidden kittens, chat spotting cats I had somehow walked straight past, suspicious marble racing and the first game in around forty years of gaming to make me feel as though I might actually be physically sick.
📸 About the Game
Cat Me If You Can is built around exploring handcrafted black-and-white comic-style 3D environments while searching for hundreds of hidden cats. Photographing them brings colour back to the cats, while each area also contains collectibles, secret routes and a few puzzle-style objectives to complete.
The game moves through several themes, including a modern Japanese-inspired city, medieval locations and Ancient Egypt. On paper, it is exactly the sort of game where you can slow down, explore every corner and spend an evening seeing just how many cats can possibly be hidden in one environment.
🐾 Where We Are in the Journey
Although this is Episode 1 of the stream series, I had already completed the entire game off-stream, earned every achievement and reached 100% because I could not help myself from continuing to play it. That did not mean I remembered where everything was, which became obvious remarkably quickly.
There was also a much bigger problem. The game can induce nausea, something the developers themselves acknowledge, and unfortunately I am one of the people affected by it. No game in forty years had ever made me want to be physically sick before this one. The only similar experience I can remember was Piranha 3D back in 2010, which I only managed around ten minutes of. I had originally tried that because Gianna Michaels was apparently in it briefly. If Karlie Montana had been in it, perhaps I would have suffered through a little longer.
But moving back to the cats.
🔎 What Happens in This Episode
The monochrome tutorial gave us our first proper look at how Cat Me If You Can works. We learned how to photograph the cats, use the displays scattered around each area, track collectibles through the journal, uncover the special god cats and make use of the rechargeable radar when something was particularly well hidden. It also produced an immediate reminder that having already completed a game does not necessarily mean remembering how to play it. I spent a while wondering whether we had somehow soft-locked the tutorial before realising I had simply forgotten to press the button needed to continue.
That was also the point where the nausea problem stopped being theoretical. I had deliberately left the game on its default settings for the tutorial so chat could see what the normal presentation looked like, but by the end of it my stomach was already tightening. Gary was reporting that his eyes were hurting as well, and other people in chat commented on the monochrome visuals and eye strain. It is frustrating because underneath all of that there is a genuinely pleasant little game here.
Once the tutorial was finished, I went back to the main menu with the intention of letting chat choose where we travelled next. There are nine main levels split across three broader themes, with the later areas moving through medieval-style locations and Ancient Egypt. What I had forgotten was that the game does not simply give you all of them immediately. You have to unlock the later stages by photographing enough cats in the earlier ones.
During my own playthrough I had completed the first level, jumped across to the Egyptian areas and only later returned to some of the earlier stages without really noticing the order in which everything had unlocked. On stream, however, there was no such freedom. Our only available destination was the first city level, Land of the Rising Meow, so that rather settled chat’s vote before anybody had a chance to cast one.
Before heading in, I changed the visual setup properly. The black-and-white presentation became sepia, I switched the crosshair on permanently to give my eyes a fixed reference point, and I moved the field of view up to 100 degrees, which generally works fairly well on my ultrawide display. It was noticeably easier to look at, but it did not completely remove the problem. Even coming out of the tutorial my stomach was still unhappy, and that feeling never really went away.
Then the actual cat hunt began.
Land of the Rising Meow is divided into a number of smaller sectors, each tracking its own cats and collectibles, and there were 85 kittens to photograph across the full level. We worked our way through streets, restaurants, classrooms, little interior spaces, rooftops, bushes, trees and whatever suspicious corner looked as though somebody might have wedged a cat into it. Some were sitting quite happily in baskets or on chairs. Others were hiding behind doors, up walls, near toilets, inside bushes or apparently establishing their own little feline empire out of sight.
The cats were only part of the search. There was homework to recover and eventually return to the classroom, vending machines to find, fish, a ticket that opened another area and the collection of stranger objects required to reveal the special cats. At one point we were also searching for what the journal described as a suspiciously shaped guitar, which is one of those phrases that naturally raises more questions than it answers.
Chat quickly became the unofficial spotting team. SpiffyMango, Gary, TheCollector31 and asmith501 were regularly pointing out kittens I had walked straight past. A cat on a seat became a cat up the wall behind it, which became another cat in a tree, while I continued looking everywhere except where chat was telling me to look. Spiffy eventually announced that I had walked past two of them before handing cat-finding responsibilities over to Gary and heading off to bed.
The radar helped whenever we became properly stuck, although it has a fairly lengthy cooldown between uses and occasionally managed to reveal something sitting more or less directly in front of me. That became part of the rhythm of the level: search every obvious location, fire the radar, discover the cat was somewhere embarrassingly visible, and then move into the next sector pretending that had been the plan all along.
As usual, the conversation wandered far beyond the game while all of this was happening. SpiffyMango had recently started working in civil engineering, so we ended up talking about early mornings, roads, waterworks and the badger burrows being dealt with on the site. Happy Cat Lady arrived during what was probably the most appropriately themed stream possible for her name and told us about a newly delivered sofa which she had already covered in stripes.
Meanwhile, the nausea discussion became almost a community experiment. Gary’s eyes were strained, Mr V declared that it would take considerably more than this to make him vomit, and that somehow led into stories about rough North Sea crossings and people spending boat journeys with their heads in bags. All perfectly normal conversation while peacefully photographing kittens.
Mr Smith then used the jukebox to bring back the Harmonica Dysentery song, including the sections where “dysentery” had been mispronounced or disappeared entirely. That naturally brought the Harmonica of Doom back into proceedings while I was still searching shelves, bushes and classrooms for cats and homework.
Not long after, a Pokémon contract appeared in chat. asmith501 accepted the job, took an ion cannon into the Savannah and successfully dealt with a Barbaracle infestation while I continued worrying about missing fish and pieces of paper. Once that crisis had apparently been resolved, everybody calmly returned to finding cats.
The in-chat Hunger Games provided another interruption later in the level. JD, Gary, Mr V, Mr Smith and I were among those dragged into the arena, and Gary somehow emerged as the winner after JD went down. When challenged over this act of betrayal, Gary offered the explanation “Survival of the fitness,” which did very little to improve his standing with the rest of us.
Despite all of the distractions, we were steadily clearing the city. The cat count dropped from dozens into the twenties, then the teens, and finally into single figures. The special cats were completed, the various collectibles were being handed in, and eventually we were left hunting one piece of homework and a handful of ordinary kittens.
The final stretch involved a lot of slowly checking bushes, classrooms, traffic lights and anything else capable of concealing a cat. One radar burst revealed that we had somehow missed another kitten in the classroom. Eventually the missing homework turned up as well, leaving only the last few cats scattered around the map.
With one kitten remaining, asmith501 suggested looking underneath a truck. The final cat was indeed around the vehicle, although not underneath it—it was above the van. One last photograph later and Land of the Rising Meow was complete. All 85 cats had finally had their photographs taken.
That was supposed to be only the first of two proper levels for the night.
Unfortunately, by then my stomach was absolutely spinning. The adjusted settings had made the game easier to tolerate than the default presentation, but they had not fixed the problem, and there was no sensible reason to immediately launch into another level. So after roughly an hour of Cat Me If You Can, we closed it down and moved over to Marbles for the rest of the evening.
That immediately replaced one sort of chaos with another.
In the first race, Gary somehow took the victory despite several of us being fairly convinced that Aida had reached the finish first. There were demands for a recount, suggestions that somebody had bribed the judge, cries of “#rigged” and, naturally, another outbreak of #blamegary. Mr Smith introduced “cheese power” as a racing strategy, while chat also developed an increasingly elaborate plan involving Ethernet cables and mesh boxes as an alternative to Mafia-style concrete shoes.
After three races, the Grand Prix standings were settled. Gary, despite his highly questionable first-race victory, ended up last in fifth place. Mr Smith finished fourth, Aida third, I became the first of the losers in second place, and Mr V reclaimed first place overall. Considering Mr V previously held the longest Grand Prix winning streak, the question now is whether this was the beginning of another one.
Just as the evening was winding down, KingIronblood arrived with a raid party. We had already been raided earlier by asmith501, so rather than immediately ending the stream we squeezed in a few minutes of Bloop. Chat began hammering the command, everybody blooped Dave, and JD eventually emerged as the king of the bloops with 1,692, ahead of Gary on 1,417.
After that, my stomach had finally had enough and we wrapped things up before raiding across to DashDucks.
Unfortunately, that also brought the Cat Me If You Can experiment to a much earlier conclusion than originally planned. I had intended to give the game two streams, one this week and another the following Tuesday, but the nausea was too severe to justify doing it again, particularly when several people watching were also reporting visual discomfort. I had already completed every level and earned every achievement off-stream, so after the broadcast I uninstalled it.
That leaves me in a slightly frustrating position with the game itself. I like the basic idea, and quietly exploring environments while photographing hidden cats is exactly the kind of thing that should make for a relaxing evening. At £15.99, though, there simply is not enough here for me. There are nine proper levels, ten if we generously count the very short tutorial, and my complete casual playthrough took somewhere around seven hours. For me, something closer to £7 would have felt much more reasonable.
I also think the game description promises more than the finished experience actually delivers. You are told that you will bring colour back to the world, but in practice it is the cats that regain their colour rather than the environments themselves. The advertised puzzles are mostly collecting clearly marked objects and taking them to their equally clear destinations. The closest I found to traditional puzzles were both in the same watchtower level: rotating discs to assemble an image and working out a combination lock.
There is not really a mystery or larger story developing behind the search either. You explore, find cats, photograph them and complete the required collections. That can still be pleasant, but it is a much simpler experience than some of the description suggests.
So that is where we will leave Cat Me If You Can. A nice idea, 85 city cats successfully photographed, plenty more already found during my completed playthrough, but unfortunately not something I can recommend at its current price or realistically continue streaming with the nausea issue.
The small silver lining is that the Tuesday slot is not going to waste. Cat Me If You Can had originally been scheduled again for next week, so instead we are bringing Valheim forward and beginning a brand-new Tuesday-night series one week earlier than planned.
🎬 Watch the Episode
If you want to see the full 85-cat hunt, the missed kittens, the nausea problem and Gary’s highly questionable Marbles victory for yourself, you can watch the full episode on YouTube.
You can also visit my YouTube channel and follow the Cat Me If You Can playlist. If you enjoy the episode, please like, comment and subscribe.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
Watching afterwards is one thing, but joining live means you can actually tell me about the cat I have just walked past for the third time.
Come and join us on Twitch or YouTube. The raids from asmith501 and KingIronblood helped make this stream what it was, and chat spotting cats, starting side games and accusing Gary of cheating was very much part of the experience.
🌐 Community & Links
The stream may end, but the conversation usually carries on somewhere else. If you want to keep up with future games, music, projects or whatever chaos comes next, these are the places to find me.
Live — Catch the next stream and help us spot whatever I have inevitably missed:
Twitch | YouTube
Community — Continue the conversation between streams:
Discord
Socials — Follow along across the rest of the internet:
TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X
Music — Find the music that occasionally becomes part of the stream chaos:
Spotify | Apple Music
Support — If you would like to help support the channel:
Fourthwall | Teespring | Streamlabs
More — Explore my other projects, services and writing:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog
🐱 Eighty-Five Cats and One Unhappy Stomach
We did at least achieve the important objective: every cat in Land of the Rising Meow had its photograph taken. Chat rescued me from several that were apparently hiding in plain sight, Mr V reclaimed the Marbles Grand Prix, JD became king of the bloops, and Gary remains under suspicion.
Cat Me If You Can may be finished, but Tuesday nights are not. Next week we move into Valheim and begin something completely new.
— Dr Ravenholm
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