Game

So I played a homebrew NES game called Witch n’ Wiz recently, and it was a cute little puzzle game. As I was playing it someone in chat went “Huh, this is kinda just Catrap”. And then I played Catrap and uh, yeah. It’s the same game.

Game

In Catrap you play as two people cursed to become cat people. Oh no, uh, how horrible. They can ‘break’ the curse though, by defeating all the enemies! It’s 100 levels, infinite lives, and it saves. This game is shockingly ahead of its time for 1990. Anyways, you can play as either the catboi or the catgirl, and they play exactly the same except for ONE thing I’ll mention later. You can defeat enemies by walking into them, but only from the side, otherwise they’re platforms. And with that, push blocks and use sand effectively to make your way through 100 levels!

Game

Catrap is a fantastic puzzle game, with great puzzle design, and I’m frankly stunned by how ahead of the curve it is for 1990. It’s got a few fun gimmicks too, like some levels have you control both girl and boy, and swap between them with select, making for fun twisty levels. The one thing that got me though, is that the set has some “beat this level as fast as you can” achievements. Which y’know, is fine. You can basically buffer your inputs, so as long as you remember where to go, it’s honestly easy. The DIFFICULT part was that, in one of the challenges, I just couldn’t do it. I was like 2 seconds off. I watched a TAS. I was following it EXACTLY, still couldn’t get there. Why? What was I doing wrong? Then, I found out…. the boy is faster. Their climbing animations are different, and the boy’s is much faster than the girl’s. That’s it. It CONFOUNDED me. So I had to play as the boy for those levels, sadly.

The only thing the actual GAME has against it, IMO, is the music. It’s pretty rough, even for 1990 Gameboy standards. Like, we’re quite a ways off from Pokemon TCG, sure, but this is honestly kinda bad.

But yeah, fantastic game, and if you like puzzlers, you should check it out.