I was playing through Viola: The Heroine’s Melody, fully expecting to review it next, but it glitched out at the very end and now I’m probably going to have to play through it all over again to reach the end. Before Viola ended up in my inbox, however, I was sent Switch and Xbox keys for an interesting-looking game called PUSS! (totally unprompted, which is a PR strategy I’m warming to) and have spent several hours with it here and there over the past two weeks or so. I’ve seriously considered never writing about it, but Viola bugging out and wiping out my progress—and somehow, even my Steam achievements, which is a new one—left me with nothing to write about besides PUSS!, which is quite possibly the worst game I’ve ever had the misfortune of playing. I’ve covered hundreds upon hundreds of games, many of which were terrible at one or two things, but PUSS! manages to be terrible at literally everything. Everything about this game is a dumpster fire of a mistake. There are no redeeming elements.

[Hey. I know every game seems to warn about flashing lights these days, and a few of them can be mildly uncomfortable to play through or watch video of, but PUSS! is next-level bad. If you’re remotely sensitive to flashing lights, this game is designed to put you in a hospital.

I’m not joking; I’ve become mostly numbed to flashing lights over the course of my 9 years working in this industry, but even I had to cover my eyes at certain points. Don’t click on any of the embedded videos unless you’re 1000000% certain that they won’t affect you. Be careful.]

I didn’t finish the game because I have self-respect, but it’s pretty clear what PUSS! is

You’re not playing as a character in PUSS!, or at least not one with a name. You’re playing as a cat who jumps into a TV and has to overcome a series of randomly selected, vaporwave-inspired levels that boil down to one of those “don’t touch the walls” flash games (which entered pop culture mainly due to the few that included a jump scare when you failed, opening the door for a whole mess of early-internet reaction videos). That’s not to say that there’s no dialog, though, because there’s some writing to be found here. The problem is that, much like everything else about PUSS!, it’s random nonsense designed to get meme-obsessed Twitch streamers frothy at the mouth instead of carefully designed in a way that makes sense.

So you get the cultist cats before the first boss fight who ramble about prophecy before killing themselves (or something). The mysterious cat who shows up to let you skip levels in return for lives. A pre-boss character who’s a butler with a cone on his head or something.

It’s all weird for the sake of being weird. I didn’t finish the game because I can’t stand to play it for more than 20 minutes at a time (for several reasons I’ll get into in a bit), but without memorable characters—or any characters, if I’m being honest about how meaningless all of the people/thing/text dispensers are—there’s no chance of a last-minute story development redeeming the writing at the very end.

Either the main character successfully beats the game’s villain (boring), it fails to do so either as sequel bait or just to be a dick (that’s a big no-no), or there’s some kind of genuinely interesting twist that falls flat on its face because no one has the personality or motivation to support it. When you include a story and bank on its ~lol so random~ness to hold everything together, you quickly paint yourself into the corner and leave yourself with no room to do anything interesting story-wise. At that point, you’d better hope that the gameplay carries the experience. Don’t count on it.

I’m not a big-city game designer, but maybe a controller isn’t the ideal input for this one

Those old internet maze games PUSS! borrows from—I don’t even know how to refer to them because they were never taken seriously enough to warrant categorization, so they may not even have a genre name—ask you to move a cursor through a maze with your mouse. That makes sense; a mouse is a very precise tool. Now imagine that you had to navigate that same maze using only a controller’s analog sticks. Then picture some randomly-selected levels that require racing along a thin line to beat a hazard to the exit. The D-pad does nothing, so you can’t move straight. Enough levels require outrunning a hazard that you have to crank your sensitivity/move speed all the way up, and then the only way to move carefully is by lightly moving the stick in a direction. However, every time you hit the wall, the entire screen goes fuzzy and shifts, oftentimes making it impossible to tell which direction you need to move in to return to a platform before the wall takes your life and starts you at the beginning.

Now imagine that the sets of levels that you can encounter include one or two that are cruel, either completely changing the way the level works right at the end or just requiring a level of precision that the wonky controls don’t afford you. And whenever you run out of lives, you restart back at the hub you reach after beating the opening salvo of levels. The Nintendo Switch version of PUSS! saves once you reach this point, but the Xbox One version doesn’t. Both games are fully updated and the Xbox One version simply has fewer options (but it does have achievements, which the Switch doesn’t currently support).

PUSS! refusing to save and robbing you of ~20 minutes of progress on the Xbox One is weird, but that problem pales in comparison to everything else. For one thing, the vaporwave visuals that are frequently flashing don’t always make it clear what is and isn’t safe to touch. I’ve lost many lives ramming into walls that I thought were platforms. Then there are the controls, which I just finished talking about, but seriously—they’re awful. If you had a continuous speed with the ability to press shoulder buttons to speed up or slow down, that would help.

Those awful controls factor into another problem, though, that being that your character doesn’t move on platforms. That’s right: you have to manually move to follow platforms, so if they’re moving at a pace that your current movement speed is too fast or slow to keep up with, then expect to die. Requiring players to play with movement speeds to match platforms (and micromanage like this in general) should have been the first signal that PUSS! was on the wrong track. And hey, while I’m complaining, it’s possible to respawn and not be sure where your character even is. This is especially a problem in boss fights, with the first one against Cerberus and the auto-runner one against Seamistress being the biggest culprits.

PUSS! hurts my eyes and ears, and this art badness makes it profoundly hard to stick with

It’s not like I have an aversion to difficult games, or even those with randomization. Hell, the last game I covered was an ultra-difficult game that required memorization and quick reflexes. I really liked that one. I’ve slogged through plenty of truly abysmal and unfair games, too. The difference between those that I’ve finished and PUSS! is its art, which gives me a headache. I find the game most comfortable on the Xbox One controller, but I can’t take a break on that console because it doesn’t save. The Switch version does (and it also allows you to desaturate the image and change the color scheme), but the flashing is out of control and really bothers me. The full-screen flashing effect that happens when you lose all of your lives is especially bad, and on multiple occasions, this is the point where I exclaimed, “nope, fuck this game forever.” I gave it a chance, but this is beyond saving, and giving myself a headache (or worse) trying to judge it in its entirety just isn’t worth the tradeoff. I have better, healthier things to do.

I was playing through Earthbound a couple of weeks ago while dogsitting and was blown away by how well its weird soundtrack full of sound effects has held up. Its amelodic elements contrast and enhance each track’s melody while also helping to carve out the rhythm on a console that didn’t allow for much drum-wise. PUSS! has a similarly weird soundtrack, but it lacks purpose or melody, going all-in on noise and sound effects. The soundtrack sounds like what would happen if you gave a symposium of beginner piano players access to pad-heavy samplers and let them all experiment at the same time while the volume was turned up as high as it could go. It’s the sound of me wanting to storm out and go back to bed.

Story: 0/3 Gameplay: 1/3 Visuals: 0/2 Music: 0/2 ★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ – 1/10 – This is a record. I’ve never gone lower than 2 before. It’s that bad.
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*Nintendo Switch and Xbox One keys were provided for this Puss! review. I didn’t even ask for them, so that was a great time-saver. Too bad about the game itself being a flaming piece of garbage.

PUSS! review (Switch & Xbox) – For you, the hardest of passes first appeared on Killa Penguin