Cat Quest 3

Who doesn’t love cats? And who doesn’t love pirates? And who doesn’t love the wholesome and gripping adventure formula of the Cat Quest games? Combine all three and what you got is quite possibly the best of the trilogy for the Cat Quest adventures! Is it true? Well read on and find out.


Get ready for the cat puns …. They’re cat-a-rific …

I will give Cat Quest a massive amount of credit for finding an incredibly fun and engaging formula, that feels familiar and quite refreshing in the adventure genre. The last two games have only built on this foundation, adding small, new concepts that lend to massive results.  

If you’re familiar with Cat Quest, you will instantly know much about this third instalment and likely fall in love with it. For those who don’t, Cat Quest is an isometric adventure game where you take on the role of a noble knight, who is a cat and has to embark on an epic adventure to face evil and save the day. These games are incredibly colourful, easy to pick up/hard to master, full of cat puns, and offer a great deal of combat, lateral elements, and a story that’s more fleshed out than it has any right to be.

With Cat Quest 3, it’s pretty much the same, except, you’re now a pirate, with a ship, crew, eye patch and everything else!

The main new inclusion is the ship, allowing you to traverse a massive open world via the high seas, land on various islands, and engage in epic battles with other ships. It’s a major new set of features and one that makes Cat Quest 3 feel like a true sequel, compared to the second game.


Woo hoo hoo and a bottle of cat nip … and a jar of dirt?

Now, I previously made a comment the writing has no right to be as fleshed out as it is, I mean, the game is called Cat Quest, but surprisingly enough there is a vast amount of lore with cosmic beings, profit-like characters born to save the world, and plenty of interesting excahnges revolving around love, death, and loss.

Cat Quest 3 has all that, while the core of the plot is to find the North Star treasure before the evil rat pirates. But there is more afoot with this narrative, diving deeper into the Cat Quest lore with some fantastic twists and turns to say the least. It sounds a little silly saying this, and again with a game aimed at children and those young at heart, but Cat Quest always gives it everything in all areas, including the narratives.

I will admit, the formula for the plot and the pacing of events is just bog standard with you finding three keys here, defeating some big baddies there, with the occasional twist thrown in for good measure. But honestly, I wasn’t expecting some high-end plot structure such as Killer7, Broken Sword or The Last of Us. But I also will admit, there is a lot of dialogue to read through and it’s just fascinating that some characters will have so much to talk about with quite a chunk not needed in the grand scheme of things.

Again, it’s not a problem if you’ve played other text-heavy RPGs or just played a Broken Sword game ever, but it’s kind of wild to meet a random character and have them leave a chunk of their life, exposition, and all that … with many, many cat puns. And, again, it’s all fine. I did love a lot of this stuff, some of it felt a tad bit tedious after a while, and it does interrupt some of the more exciting moments when you’re fighting or exploring, and then 5 or 7 speech bubbles come up explaining the current mood of the situation, with cat puns.


Paw-some adventures on the high seas

I do love Cat Quest’s humble and gripping gameplay core, being you set off on an adventure, with a cool isometric view, traversing cartoonishly style locations that make you feel like a giant on a world map, and be given a whole heap of weapons, tools, and other goodies to customise your playstyle.

Not much has changed for the dry land stuff, as you will be venturing around, exploring caves, dungeons, and fortresses, collecting treasure and resources to upgrade your loot, and plenty of fighting critters and evildoers. It’s simple, but the vast amount of gear and choice of weapons/spells opens up the amount of variety in playstyles and actions to perform in the world. You can focus on melee, spell casting, or be a cat with guns! Firearms have a spotlight in Cat Quest 3, and they’re great fun, making you feel more like a pirate. But mixing this with spellcasting makes you feel more like something from Oblivion … or Bio-Shock!

Exploration is quite immense as there is something to discover around every corner, on every island in the game. With riddles, buried treasures, and new NPCs to speak to all around you. There were some genuine breath-taking discoveries, and setting off on the high seas, and finding a powerful boss by random chance brought about the most super-duper tension and dread since I played Dredge back in 2023.

There is a nice amount of activity on the high seas, but nothing that compares to the likes of Sea of Thieves. It would have been nice if there were more events and smaller activities to partake in while sailing the seas, such as fishing and transportation of goods. But Cat Quest, at its core, is about the adventure on a grand scale, and the ship is more a traversal than an extension of gameplay in meaningful ways. But we have combat and ship progression which is still neat and fun.

Back on land, it’s the same old flair the Cat Quest games have delivered for years now. As I said, everything that worked before is right here, with great exploration, dungeon crawling, character progression, and nice side quests which make the world feel alive. And all this good, is also Cat Quest’s 3 biggest detriment, since everything feels quite safe and samey, even if this sequel feels more like a sequel with the ship/pirate stuff compared to 2, it still hasn’t stretched its legs and gone into truly new areas to expand the core further.

I also did have some gripes with the difficulty at times, with hidden information on the desired rank of an area/dungeon ahead of venturing into it. With some of them posted on their difficulty/desired rank, and others not so much or not at all. There are plenty of enemies which do take a beating even with decent weapons, feeling like tanky sponges, and performing infuriating stun lock attacks, which on the hardest difficulty will end you. That said, there is a good deal of strategy and tactical critical thinking for a game which has cats, and button-bashing attacks, thanks to the variety of styles from spells, melee and firearms, and all the upgrades for them.


Overall?

Cat Quest 3 is a delightful adventure, that anyone can utterly enjoy. If you’re a fan of the previous games, then you will certainly love this sequel for sure. The classic Cat Quest formula is still here, with new little inclusions, weapons, and story beats to widen the scope of the franchise, while the ship traversal and high seas combat add in something truly new and refreshing. I was hoping there would be more to the core gameplay, with deeper, meaningful mechanics that explored more engaging RPG elements in a low-fi kind of way.

It's a solid game, a very enjoyable one that I sunk quite a few hours into. But I had that feeling of déjà vu, even if it was a little less than Cat Quest 2. The formula and core gameplay is awesome, with Cat Quest being one of the most enjoyable series to introduce younger gamers to the RPG genre. But with Cat Quest 4… there needs to be a whole lot more for the series to truly thrive and expand. It’s nice to do what works well, and having the right formula I can see why you would want to stick to it. But the developers should go from their comfort zone, as it’s time to let the cat out of the bag for the future.


++ Great adventure/RPG gameplay
++ Presentation and performance were top notch
+ The pirate ship gameplay adds some nice new dynamics

-- Even with the ship, there is nothing massively new for this sequel
- Some annoyances with difficulty balancing


A review code for Cat Quest 3 was kindly provided by the publisher.