Review: Cats and Seek: Kyoto (Nintendo Switch)

Cats and Seek: Kyoto is a hidden object game developed by Noobzilla and published by Silesia Games. I’ve played one other game in this franchise–Cats and Seek: Dino Park–and enjoyed it. I enjoyed this entry, but it left me feeling like there should have been more.

This title is another hand-drawn hidden object game where you’re searching for cats over two different scenes of Kyoto. One scene contains 109 hidden cats and the other has 155 cats waiting to be found.

It plays the same as Dino Park, where the left analog stick controls your cursor and the right analog stick allows you to pan through the image. The shoulder buttons zoom in and out. When you find a cat and click on it, it’ll meow and a brief bio plus a name will appear. It’s cute, but that’s all it does.

In addition to finding cats, there are chests hidden about, too. One contains a cat and the rest are empty. Keys are also scattered about in the picture to open these chests. After playing through a previous installment of this Cats and Seek series, I’ve found a good enough system to find all the cats, keys, and chests in one go without having to backtrack. I only had to use the hint button once to find the final cat in the first picture.

Between the two scenes, there are also 25 total jigsaw pieces hidden in Cats and Seek: Kyoto. Once you find all the pieces, you can put together a jigsaw puzzle from the main menu. This wasn’t in the other game, so it was a nice touch. However, I think it would have been nice to have a jigsaw puzzle for each scene.

Once you do that, voila! You’re done with the game. You can customize the scenes with different colors to make it easier on your eyes, but I preferred the black and white with found cats being highlighted in yellow. Another feature of this game is a camera, where you can take a snapshot of a part of a scene and then color it in. I tried it out, but didn’t continue because I cared more about the hidden object part. I would have much rather had another scene to find cats in or another jigsaw puzzle.

Dino Park has five pictures, and while Cats and Seek: Kyoto has the jigsaw puzzle, it only has two scenes. Overall, this game took me about twenty minutes to complete. I enjoyed my time with it like I did the previous title, but I would have liked to see more content and have been able to spend more time with the game. I could have redone the pictures with a timer to see how fast I could go, but I already completed both and the puzzle in less than thirty minutes, so I didn’t feel the need to.

If you like hidden object games, and want something quick to get through, then certainly give Cats and Seek: Kyoto a try.