The Cat! Porfirio's Adventure

I'm always a little amused by Steam games that have titles with strange punctuation. The Cat! Porfirio's Adventure certainly qualifies in that regard, but behind the title is a game obviously tailored more towards kids than 37-year old exclamation point lovers.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing. This game has a beautifully colorful art style, a simple charm in its story, and easy-to-follow directions and prompts, making it perfect for kids between 6 and 8 years of age, or just kids at heart who love talking cat games. I mean who doesn't, right?!?

The story is standard fare children's stuff, it almost seems ripped straight from an actual storybook, though I could not find one online to match. Porifirio is a city cat, taken by his family to the farm for the summer, where he will need to make new friends and fill his days with interesting things. Of course, at first the other cats do not like him, and they are very upfront about that. To put it bluntly, the other cats are jerks, but Porifirio is sure he can win them over.

The village cats are a unintentionally (I assume) hilarious because the voice acting is a bit over-the-top. Two of them sound like they were previously cast as thugs in a Guy Ritchie movie. This might be due to the fact that the developer is Russian and this is the best they could do on a translation. In fact these are the same developers who released Syrian Warfare which was a fairly controversial game at the time. Yes that's right, this children's game and the creator of a highly realistic current-event warfare simulator are the same people. Pretty crazy right?

Most of the activities that Porifirio has to do to prove his worth to win over the cats (which seems like a strange lesson to teach a child) involve jumping and running. Two things I suppose that cats are doing a lot of, so this makes sense, but it wouldn't be so painful if the jumping and running had control schemes that could support them, or were in any way responsive.

For one, the game claims to have "partial controller support" but you have to map the keybinds manually and well, it's just not worth the effort. Using the mouse to aim the camera and the arrow keys (but not WASD) to move around is manageable, but only barely. When the game starts throwing complex jumping segments at you, you'll want to take HEAVY advantage of the game's quick save button (F5) to make sure you don't get set back too far. 

If the tutorial levels that establish all the running and jumping don't scare you (or your kid who is probably used to better controls) away, then the game is happily serviceable for a few hours of fun. At the cost you will pay for this, you can find worse games (especially for kids) to waste time with. 

That being said, it's hard to recommend this game. It's not terrible by any means, but with the controls being as butchered as they are, you will have to really be looking for a cat game to play to make this one worth your while, and there are plenty of other cat games on Steam. It's the internet after all.