At Casual Connect Asia last year we learned about Achtung, a Taiwanese gaming company that had created a bunch of remarkably cute, square-shaped cats under its Catsblock brand. It launched in the form of Facebook puzzle games and an assortment of action and simulation games for mobile.
It has since joined forces with F K Digital, a development studio headquartered in Sydney and with a branch office in Taiwan, to come up with Catsblock Vestival for PSN.
Catsblock Vestival is a combination of Catsblock Timeboom (a Facebook puzzle game) and Catsland, the simulator we got a chance to try last year. It brings depth and breadth to a cat simulator by allowing you to earn rewards and advance through the story by completing match-3 puzzles.
The Catsblock aliens have crash landed on earth and gotten separated from one another. The intrepid Totan is the first cat you come across, and he’s taken in by a little girl enchanted by his cute looks. Totan realizes that the girl – or his slave, so he thinks – would welcome more of his adorable kin, and he sets out to rescue them. Or rather, you set out to rescue them by completing stage after stage of match-3 puzzles.
The puzzle feature in Catsblock Vestival is interesting. It’s set at an isometric angle rather than your usual top down or horizontal view, and this makes aiming a little difficult. Columns of three cats will drop down endlessly, and you must match at least three of the same color in order to clear them off the board. Each level has a select number of colored cats you must eliminate in order to progress and there are a total of five stages with ten levels each.
Although neither brand owner Achtung nor developer F K Digital (which is from Australia) are Japanese, the game has Japanese dialog and comes replete with all the wacky sound effects you find in Japanese games. The production value in the game is very high, and you’d be hard pressed to imagine this stemmed from a simple Facebook puzzle game. The cats themselves are also voiced and each have a unique personality. And they love the television! Turning it on makes them all scamper towards it.
Catsblock Vestival may be a simple puzzle game, but for just S$8.10 (US$5.95) on the Playstation store, the fifty levels and cat-petting opportunities it offers are well worth it. Catsblock Vestival is available for the PS Vita.
7.5/10.
See: Pencil box characters come to life in a series of cute, cartoony games
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