The Cat Lady [Game Review]

There aren't many video games about the everyday sufferings of crotchety middle-aged women, but The Cat Lady manages to elevate the horrors of domestic suffering to cosmic proportions.

The game begins with a suicidal woman being given immortality - a cruel punishment for someone who wants nothing more than to die. You play as Susan Ashworth, who starts the game by downing a bottle of pills while being watched by her concerned black cat, Teacup. However you soon find that death is not the end of your sufferings, and in a dark woods between life and death you discover a strange woman some call The Queen of Maggots, who tells you that you must kill 5 evil people before you will be allowed to die.

The Cat Lady is a flawed albeit beautiful gemstone buried within the Steam horror category - produced in 2012 by Harvester Games, I happened upon it by accident searching through the horror tag. The Cat Lady almost feels like a game that was unearthed from a parallel world, or discovered in some secret developer's basement. Since I'd heard nothing of this game, it almost felt like I was the only one who'd ever played it.

The Cat Lady employs point-and-click style game mechanics. You use the arrow keys and the enter key to interact with everything in the environment. The controls feel a little clunky, and the character sometimes difficult to manage, but they seem to work with the odd, pasted-on art style and contribute to the overall surrealism of the experience.

The Cat Lady is a horror game - but ultimately, it's a game about familiar pains. Susan suffers from depression brought on by the ordinary pain of living. The loss of love, the death of a child, growing old, isolation. The environments are once familiar, but distorted. Hospitals, basements, and apartment flats warp around you, leaving you feeling disoriented and alienated - oftentimes in a way that will feel familiar to the suicidal or the depressed. Oftentimes it employs a black and white palette, with small splashes of color to signify that certain objects are important.

There are no easy answers in this game, and sometimes the storyline is clunky and messy, much like its control scheme. There is a lot of symbolism that is never quite explained (Which may be what you prefer.) The voice-over work tends to be inconsistent, with some characters too loud and others too quiet. Still, it's worth playing for the horror aficionado, and its story stayed with me long after I finished the game.

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